Have you ever tried to search for medical information on the major search engines, only to come away disappointed by your results? You’re not alone. In this article, the second of two parts, we take a look at the vertical search engines focused on health-related information that are trying to fill this need.
In the previous article, we took a look at the rising need for search engines to help those who are looking for health-related information. We noted the increasing number of vertical search engines attempting to fill this need, and then examined how the major search engines were trying to help searchers with their own versions of health-focused search engines (i.e. Yahoo Health, MSN Health & Fitness). We gave Google, Yahoo Health, and MSN Health & Fitness three queries with different levels of difficulty to see how well they could sort out the needs of someone searching for medical information.
These engines performed well for more general queries on which there was a great deal of information, and offered various options for narrowing the search. Even a query that might be considered intermediate did not seem too difficult for them. But a query involving a medical abbreviation proved to be a little more challenging, especially for Google and MSN Health & Fitness (though to the latter's credit, it was able to suggest related searches that led to the proper results). For most but not all searches, the search engines included sponsored listings at the top, before the organic results - and these ads weren't always relevant.
Specialized search engines claim that they can deliver a better, more relevant performance. Some say that they carefully weed out their results to avoid anything smelling of spam or scams. (Note: most of my searches on the major engines didn't turn up scams, but then again I wasn't searching on terms that should have been popular among medical scammers). Some also sort their results into categories that are supposed to be more meaningful for searchers, or offer filters to make the results more personally relevant -- to account for the searcher's gender or family history for example, rather than returning categories that apply only to the disease itself.
How well do they deliver on these promises? To find out, I decided to run the same three searches on Kosmix, Healthline, and Healia that I ran on the major search engines: "breast cancer," "BRCA testing," and "ACL." Keep reading to see what I found.
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