Background: The Internet is the main source of health information for 70% of American adults. Until 2001, approximately 52 million Americans had already consulted the internet for medical information. In this sense, become important researches or specific interventions to better understand the use of internet for health care—benefits, risks, user profiles and their behavior.

Objectives: The aim of this work is to advance the understanding of consumers profile and their trends searching for health information online.

Methods: One thousand eight hundred and eleven individuals responded to an electronic form available in a large health portal access (6 million page views a month). In addition, 20 experts were interviewed to evaluate strategies to control quality of health information transmitted on the web.

Results: There was a predominance of female users who seek information for their own health (90%), who consider the internet one of their main sources of health information (86%) and spend 5–35 hours per week in the web (62%). The sample assigned high confidence to information of experts (76%) and low confidence in television, radio or blogs (14%).

Conclusions: It is concluded that the internet has proved a source of health information of great relevance to population and that the certification of sites is a strategy to be considered with a view to improving the quality of information and promoting public health.