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Internet users who go online to find out information about suicide are more likely to find sites that promote the act than sites offering support, a study says.

Researchers used four search engines to find suicide related sites, according to a study in the British Medical Journal. The three sites that appeared most frequently in the search results all promoted suicide. 

The researchers, from Bristol, Oxford and Manchester universities, used 12 suicide related search terms to conduct their study. They looked at the first 10 sites in each search, receiving a total of 480 hits.

Overall, the searches found 240 unique sites. Slightly less than half of the sites provided information about methods of suicide. Nearly 19 percent of hits were considered to be encouraging, promoting, or facilitating suicide. Just 13 percent of the sites were for suicide prevention or support and only 12 percent actively discouraged suicide.

The study concludes that," The differing content identified with the four search engines indicates that it is possible to influence what searches retrieve. It may be more fruitful for service providers to pursue website optimization strategies to maximize the likelihood that suicidal people access helpful rather than potentially harmful sites in times of crisis."