Healthy Future for Vertical Search Engines? - Healthy Rivals
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It’s no surprise, then, that several companies have tried to fill in that gap, including the major search engines. Google offers some interesting refinements on certain health-related search queries. Yahoo offers its own combination health portal and search engine, Yahoo Health. MSN has something similar called MSN Health & Fitness.
There are also search engines especially devoted to health. Kosmix boasts several vertical search engines, including one specifically for health; I reviewed the site back in March. It seems to have added several new vertical engines since then. There is also Healia, a relatively new addition with four years of research behind it. Like Kosmix, Healia is still in beta, though it went live to the public in mid-September. Healthline offers more of a portal look and feel in addition to the search engine, while Vimo lets its users comparison shop for doctors, insurance plans, and even surgical procedures.
So how do these diverse engines stack up? Well, let’s start with the major search engines. I’m going to give them both an easy query and a couple of more challenging ones. For the easy query, let’s go with “breast cancer.” For something a little more challenging, I’m going to use a related topic that a woman doing research on this might be curious about: “BRCA testing.” For the hard one, I have to give credit to Healia: “ACL.” This is short for “anterior cruciate ligament,” a stabilizing ligament that connects your thighbone to your shinbone, and can be torn when you twist or knee or fall on it.
So the first step is to start with a search on the term “breast cancer” on Google. The top two results are sponsored links, and of course there are a number of sponsored links to the right. The other links on the first page appear to go to educational sites, such as the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
But Google also gives you the option of refining your results; just below the sponsored links and just before the organic results, you can click on links for treatment, symptoms, tests/diagnosis, causes/risk factors, for patients, for health professionals, from medical authorities, and alternative medicine. Clicking on the various links gives you different results, or at least rearranges the ones you get.
Google does even better with BRCA testing. It doesn’t show the links to narrow down your search as it did for breast cancer; it also doesn’t show any sponsored links at the top, and only two at the side. The first organic result directs you to WebMD and is specifically labeled “Breast Cancer (BRCA) Gene Test.” The third link leads to a page that asks “Who Should be Tested for BRCA Gene Mutations” and the fifth link leads to a page that explains details of the test itself.
So far we’re highly relevant – but not surprisingly, Google falls down on the ACL query. This is where a general search engine shows its weakness. Only the fourth link is relevant, because ACL in the general world can mean anything from Austin City Limits to the Association for Computational Linguistics (and much else besides).
Next: How about Yahoo? >>
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