Healthy Future for Vertical Search Engines? - How about Yahoo?
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Let’s try the same set of searches over at Yahoo Health. Unlike Google’s search, I didn’t get there directly; I went to the Yahoo home page and clicked on the link for more Yahoo services first, and then clicked on the one for health. As I mentioned before, this site is not a bare search engine, but a portal – and it has a tab for breast cancer. Clicking on that link brought up more links that covered particular topics, such as mammography, lifestyle and prevention, etc. These links led to articles discussing the topic in question, as well as links to related topics.
Clicking on a general link within this tab for more on breast cancer took me to a sort of breast cancer portal, with links to more information than I could shake a stick at. But it seemed well-organized; beyond the eye-catching items, there were links to specific topics, including symptoms and diagnosis, treatments, medications, and more. There were also links on this portal to Yahoo Groups for breast cancer.
I still felt obligated to do an actual search on the phrase "breast cancer" in the Yahoo Health search engine. Yahoo returned a three-column page. The left column actually sorted the types of hits. You could choose to see the results for types of information (27 types, including news, ask the expert, medications, symptoms and diagnosis, and many more) or topics (60 topics, including breast cancer, women’s health, cancer and chemotherapy, and so on). The middle column included the organic results, with two sponsored links at the top. Unfortunately, you couldn’t see the URLs or where the information was coming from exactly. The column on the right, of course, was entirely for sponsored results.
A search for BRCA testing turned up remarkably specific results. While Google returned 981,000 results, Yahoo Health returned only 48. I noticed that there was also a link labeled “About this page…” that explained the various sections of the page and what they mean (sponsored results, category sponsors, web results, etc.). That’s useful for someone feeling a little overwhelmed – as anyone worried about their health or the health of a loved one and searching for information might feel.
Searching for ACL on Yahoo Health turned up 64 results. One of the topics on the left was rather puzzling, though: what does that ligament have to do with addiction? Three articles supposedly fit that topic and all seemed to deal with exercise. The first and third links were dead; the page for the second link, I noticed, mentioned “rehab” and “rehabilitation” a lot, but did not mention addiction itself. I can only guess that it was misclassified because of its use of the other two terms.
Next: Checking out MSN >>
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