**5. Conclusions**

This study investigated the online health information-seeking behavior of undergraduate students. The results revealed that most of the keywords used by the study participants when searching for health information were nouns, although some used a mixture of nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. Few participants searched using Boolean logic, and few limited the scope of their queries to narrow down the retrieved data. Almost all the study participants questioned the validity of the information they found, considered the authors of the data to be anonymous or non-professionals, and were dubious about the information available on the internet.

The widespread availability of e-health information has become an important issue for public health gains. From the viewpoint of the reader, individuals are exposed to a large amount of information that is easily accessible for everyone on the internet, suggesting that technological risks are relevant to individuals' lives but are often widely ignored or overlooked. It is suggested that in the future, the online health information retrieval skills needed by adolescents can be appropriately integrated into university curricula in the form of training through relevant information collection skills and expertise, such as clinical understanding, prevention strategies, and navigation of the healthcare system [27]. Students' skills in searching for information and their ability to distinguish between true and false information should also be fostered.

This study had a few limitations. The Delphi method used in the research has its own restriction, such as the identification of "consensus" amongst experts, which appears to be the central motivation for the application of Delphi techniques in health sciences. Nevertheless, there is no general definition for what consensus actually is. As far as the research replicability is concerned, this study was aimed at college students, and there were limitations related to the ecological validity of our research results due to the small sample size. Future studies should, therefore, employ larger research samples, using this article as an introduction for further analysis regarding the process of seeking health information in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. In terms of the study design, this research asked respondents to answer pre-designed health questions, which may have limited its intrinsic validity, failing to assess the online health information retrieval behavior of individuals when they face personal health problems. In addition to designing a series of health questions to explore the participants' online health information retrieval practices through observational methods, future research could ask participants to describe their online health information retrieval process in a "think aloud" manner to better understand their subjective use.

**Funding:** This research was funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, grant number 109-2511-H-992-005-MY2.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Review of Human Research Ethics Committee of National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) (protocol code #108-202 on 19 May 2019).

**Informed Consent Statement:** Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not available.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
