Vertical Search Engines in a Healthy Space - Checking Healthline
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I made Healthline.com my next stop. As with Yahoo and MSN, it was a portal-like site, but heavier on text and lighter on images. The site offers 200 health "channels" (showing only the top ones on the home page, but offering a link that displays them all in alphabetical order from ADD/ADHD to Yeast infections). Inevitably, there was one for breast cancer. This page had relevant banner ads (no surprise there). In a column on the left you could choose from various related topics.
The large center column contains real content, starting you off with basic information: definition, symptoms, causes, risk factors, and more. Scroll down and you get links to more articles. Most of these links have a hyperlink next to them labeled "doctor-reviewed information;" click on that link and you receive a pop-up explaining that such articles are regularly reviewed by medical doctors to ensure their accuracy. That's a very nice feature.
In the main search box on Healthline's home page, you can choose to search either the web or news. A news search on breast cancer returned only three results (and two sponsored links above them, one of which is not even relevant to breast cancer). To the right of the results were ads by Google. A web search on Healthline for breast cancer returned results from both Healthline's channel and the general web, clearly separated. A number of articles from the web include "trust marks" which you can click on for more information about what they are. And you could always tell where your information was coming from. Also, to assist your searching, at the top of the search results Healthline included a banner that gave you options for broadening or narrowing your search, and checking related topics.
So how did Healthline do for BRCA testing? It only returned 29 web results, but many of these were remarkably specific. The first one linked to an article that talked about testing for people of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry (very on-topic, because the BRCA gene mutations are strongly linked to those with that ancestry). Strangely, Healthline seemed to fixate more on the "testing" part of my query than I would have expected; the tenth result concerned HIV testing, not at all relevant to my topic. And at the top, before the two sponsored links, Healthline asked me if I meant broca testing - that's good in some cases, of course, but it's not what I meant. Searching for news results was more encouraging - seven links, all relevant, ranging from six hours to nine days old.
Finally, I did a search for ACL. At the top, I got two options for broadening my search; then, after two ads for Google, the organic results included 13 from Healthline and more than 250 from the web. News results were very recent and, not surprisingly, sports-related. All ads were relevant.
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