Eighty percent of Americans who go online use the Internet to track down health care information, a percentage exceeded only by users of e-mail and search engines, according to a study conducted last August and September by the Pew Research Center and the California HealthCare Foundation.

Since not all Americans get on the Internet, Pew says that the 80 percent who use online to search health care subjects works out to 59 percent of the overall adult population.

A plurality of these users (48 percent) say they are looking up the information on behalf of someone else, 36 percent say they are getting it for themselves and 11 percent say they are searching on behalf of both themselves and another.