Vertical Search Engines in a Healthy Space - Revisiting Kosmix
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As I noted in the previous article, I've reviewed Kosmix before. The search engine (still in beta) has expanded its list of vertical search engines beyond what I remembered from my last visit, adding at least two more categories (video games and autos). It will be interesting to see how much more this develops, but not to the point for today's task.
For breast cancer, Kosmix returned more than 600,000 results divided into particular categories: news, basic information, support groups and tools, natural remedies, written for medical professionals, and specific patients. Right at the top, the first result links to a definition of breast cancer - and it's not from Wikipedia, it's from a company called MedicineNet.com. When you scroll down the results, you see that they're grouped by the particular categories, and each category has subcategories listed next to it on the left.
The top results for each main category are given to you by default, but next to "basic information" (for example) you can click on subcategories for definition, causes, symptoms, and more to reorder your results. Clicking on one of these subcategories made the section go blank, and its reappearance sometimes took so long that I thought the search engine hadn't found anything in that area. Finally, in the column on the right, which most of the other search engines reserved for sponsored results, were highly relevant results which may or may not have been sponsored: breast cancer organizations, local hospitals (with a hospital finder that worked off of zip code), and - perhaps inevitably - ads by Google.
BRCA testing returned fewer results, of course - about 1,632, an amount a truly determined woman could scroll through. Like the previous set, these were divided into news, basic information, support groups and tools, natural remedies, written for medical professionals, and specific patients. Natural remedies...for a medical test? Here again the slowness of the engine proved a bit maddening, and when the links did come up, I couldn't tell from the short extracts included with the links why these should be placed in the natural remedies category rather than somewhere else.
For ACL, Kosmix delivered the kind of relevant results you'd expect from a specialized search engine - more than 34,000, in fact. There is one point worth noting about many of Kosmix's results though: they list a small section of sponsored links in with the organic results. They're not at the top; they're listed in a separate category called "Products and Services" and they're clearly differentiated from the rest of the results by having a different color background. Google has experimented with offering sponsored listings in with the regular results in a similar manner; it did not go over well. Kosmix might have more success with it simply because it already separates its results into separate categories that are visually distinguished as you scroll down.
Next: Checking Healthline >>
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