August 22, 2006

Search Medica - The GPs Search Engine

Search Medica is a search engine that has been specifically designed for GPs (General Practitioners or Doctors) to use. Pulse, a UK weekly news magazine for doctors conducted research that seemed to suggest that doctors were unhappy with the results of the medical searches that they were running on traditional search engines.

Consequently Search Medica has been produced in conjunction with doctors to provide them with a very specific and tailored search experience. It's still in beta testing at the moment, so has lots of requests for feedback. Although I've only taken a brief look at it (and I'm certainly not a medical practitioner) my prediction is that this will very swiftly become a firm favourite, not just with medical professionals, but also with the general public.

The search interface screen is clean and clear, giving searchers the opportunity to search for their subject limited to medical sites as chosen by doctors, NHS (National Health Service) sites, or the entire web. Once a search has been run the searcher has the option of running it a second time, with the option of further limiting to various sub categories such as evidence, patient information, guidelines or reference. There is also an option to limit results to the UK only.

There is a very neat and tidy option to narrow or broaden a search - clicking on the link slides out various suggested approaches. Below that and to the left of the screen (with the results on the right) are options to view the most relevent content in various sectors, such as evidence, patient information and so on - exactly the same options as are made available for a second search, giving users quick access to results without the necessity of re-running the search. Below these options is a final category 'related concepts'.

The main results are presented in the usual fashion; numbered, with the title, brief summary with keyword in context and link to the site/page. There is also a 'Was this helpful?' option, which I presume is as a result of the beta nature of the engine. I would have liked rather more information at this point (date and a cached version for example), but that may clutter up the screen rather too much. Results are drawn from web pages, .pdf files and full text journal articles.

Search Medica was simple, clear and intuitive to use. As it is backed by a respected UK medical journal, and GPs are involved with its development I suspect that it will gain wide acceptance quickly, and because of its ease of use this won't be limited to the medical profession.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 12:46 PM | Permalink

May 10, 2006

Google Co-op: Add Your Own Vertical Search To Google

Google said it would have a health-related announcement at today's Google Press Day -- but no, it's not Google Health. Instead, it's Google Co-op, a way for people to create specialized search engines by tapping into the main Google index or the option for searchers to pick preferred vertical search providers to show up in Google OneBox results. Yes, health information is one of the new features -- but this is more than Google Health. This is Google making a giant and somewhat perplexing leap into mass tagging.

Subscribed Links

Let's start in with the specialty or vertical search providers, what Google calls subscribed links. Many are probably familiar with how for some queries, Google will show what it calls a OneBox result at the top of the "regular" results. For example, a search on san francisco hotels brings up a section like this at the top of the page

Local results for hotels near San Francisco, CA San Francisco Marriott - 1.0 miles NE - 55 4th St, San Francisco, 94103 - (415) 896-1600 Hyatt Hotels & Resorts: Park Hyatt San Francisco - 1.7 miles NE - 333 Battery St, San Francisco, 94111 - (415) 392-1234 Hyatt Hotels & Resorts: Hyatt at Fisherman's Wharf - 2.2 miles N - 555 N Point St, San Francisco, 94133 - (415) 563-1234

Those results are powered by one of Google's own vertical search engine, Google Maps (formerly Google Local). The new subscribed links service lets people choose other non-Google vertical search engines to show at the top of the page, if they want to.

It's a very cool idea. For example, say you are regularly searching for information about search engines and would like to know if Search Engine Watch specifically has any matching info along with searching the entire web for that topic. If we get our act together (and we'll try soon), you could make us one of your subscribed links. Then the next time you search for something where we have content, you might see our matches right at the top of Google.

Where do you find providers? Google's got a currently very small directory of them here to choose from. Preferred partners are already listed, partners that Google thinks people will be especially interested in, not those who have paid. No money is exchanging hands in either direction to be a subscribed link provider, Google says.

Digg is the only news provider listed at the moment. I subscribed to see how it works. Not too well. Perhaps not at all. Searches for Google, Playstation, Nintendo -- all topics on Digg right now -- brought nothing up. Hmm. I tried subscribing to People. Searches on Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie gave me nothing.

Frankly, I don't think the system is working right just yet, as I'll get to further below. I also have a note out to Google about this. In the meantime, let's just pretend it's working. How do we at Search Engine Watch or anyone else get to be in that directory or a subscribed link partner in general.

Here's the guide that allows anyone to get started. I had to laugh at the intro:

The API was designed to be as easy to use as possible, and requires only basic XML skills. This guide will show you how to create subscribed links, with plenty of examples along the way.

I laughed because in short order, I was lost! Barry Schwartz, who is a programmer, still felt lost himself and said he'd through it at "one of his XML guys" tomorrow. In contrast, making a Google Toolbar Button is a heck of a lot easier. I sure wish making subscribed links were, because they are potentially going to be an important new way for people to ensure they are getting traffic from Google.

Anyone can make a subscribed link to offer on via their own site (though the developer guide doesn't go into details about this, such as how to place it). Naturally, what you really want is to be in the directory that Google itself offers. Again, the developer guide doesn't cover this. But this appears to be the submission page.

As for who gets in, Google told me that those included and featured in the directory will be based on user uptake. Get a lot of people subscribing to your results, and you'll more likely be featured to users.

Two last things on Subscribed Links:

First, another OneBox! Just how much can Google shove above the "regular" results. Google tells me that they are currently trying not to show more than two of their own -- so potentially, you might be looking at three in all on the page. You'll never see more than on Subscribed Links OneBoxes, and these will come before Google's own.

Second, if the entire idea feels familiar, you might be recalling Yahoo Subscriptions. That launched last June and is explained more in our Yahoo Search Subscriptions Brings Premium Content Into Web Search article.

I've no idea how popular the service is, but I'm guessing not much, given that most people seem never to have heard of it. Unlike the Google system, the number of partners is very small and there's no API allowing anyone to jump in. Instead, you've got to go the contact form route. I suspect Google's system will be far more popular, since it should have a much wider range of providers.

Labels, Google Health & Vertical Search

A second part of Google Co-op is the ability to allow people to label URLs into different topic areas. You mean tagging! Google still prefers the term label, while I'm still a hold out for saying categories. But whatever the name, it's not like the idea of tagging you might be used to at other places. This is industrial-strength tagging.

For example, with Yahoo My Web 2.0, I can tag any page with any words I prefer. The system is really designed for me to tag on a one-by-one basis. If I do a search, see something I like, I can click the Save button, add a tag, some notes and have that individual page stored for easy recall.

Yes, I can import many pages and assign them all tags en masse. But that doesn't seem to be the case for most people. The system currently has only 1.1 million pages tagged, hardly double the amount I recall it having not long after launching last year. If there were massive tagging imports, I'd expect the number to be higher.

In contrast, Google's label system is initially designed as a more mass tagging system for those who want to create vertical search engines. Google's now rolled out a number of these:

Let's dive into the health area. Sure, call it Google Health if you want -- though Google says a more full-fledged Google Health is coming and definitely doesn't call this Google Health itself. Whatever you all it, this health thing lets you search against pages that have been labeled with the help of contributors such as the Mayo Clinic or the Harvard Medical School as being health-specific.

Ideally, it means that I should be able to do a search and get back only stuff related to health issues. Here's an example. Say I search for cold on regular Google. The first link is for the musical band Cold, and the third link is for Cold Stone Creamery. That's great place for ice cream, but the only health connection is that it might make you fat! Midway down, Macromedia shows up because of its ColdFusion product, then there are two links on the Cold War followed by two links on Cold Mountain.

For regular Google, this variety is fine. Who knows what you want when you search for the word cold? It could be any number of things. But for a health search, you want to get rid of all that junk. Google Health's labels ideally should do this. But go there, then search and what happens? Pretty much nothing. The off-topic stuff I mentioned is still there!

I suspect there's a bug in the system right now. Google Co-op didn't go live when announced, and then it slowly came up. I'll check on this, and the better test will be in a day or so, especially when some of these new topical areas are pitted against existing verticals in various areas. But conceptually, hopefully you'll understand what's happening. In each of the topic areas above, either contributors have helped label content or Google's worked behind-the-scenes to get some of these going.

Keep in mind that for any top level label/topic/category, there are also sublabels/subtopics/subcategories. So for health, you'll see further narrowing options such as:

Symptoms
Treatment
Drug Uses
Support Groups

What about for the more individual user that wants to label? Good luck. Here are a bunch of instructions. They make my head spin. Maybe it will spin less when I read it many more times. But compared to tagging elsewhere, it's a nightmare.

Heck, it's a nightmare compared to trying to make a vertical search engine period versus a place like Rollyo. Want to make a health vertical search engine there? Give it up to 25 web sites and you're done.

Google told me it does want to make the process easier for anyone to take part, so hang in there, if the programming stuff makes you feel excluded as it does me.

The downside to Rollyo, compared to what Google's doing, is that you won't have all the refinement and subcategories. But I find it difficult to understand how well these will work, anyway. There's no controlled vocabulary for new people coming in. Moreover, it seems like some of these refinements could be done through clustering. My Yahoo My Web Tagging & Why (So Far) It Sucks article goes into some depth about these types of issues from when Yahoo rolled out My Web 2.0. They seem just as applicable to the new Google label system.

When Yahoo launched My Web 2.0, my gut felt like we were making a big step backwards, using humans to do stuff where technology actually could work. I wrote similar things when Google Base went up, pushing people into tagging content when it might not be necessary.

Don't get me wrong. I want humans involved in the search process. If anything, I've also written about how the growth of crawlers and automation has pushed human help sadly -- and perhaps harmfully to relevance -- to the side.

Certainly it's a big positive that Google's letting humans more in the door this way -- a huge jump for the service that has pretty much looked to technology to solve everything, as it acknowledges.

"We've never given our users this much control and access into our system," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products & user experience. "We have an advantage with machines and how we crawl, but if we can turn our users into a network, that will yield better results."

Still, I think the idea of humans sharing and swapping what they like such as with Yahoo My Web or via the recent change with Google Reader might be the better way to go rather than manually tagging up millions of pages of content. But we'll see how it goes. As for the idea of subscribed links -- I've got a big thumbs-up for that part of Google Co-op.

Postscript: Google Blogoscoped has a nice guide to how Google Co-op also works for publishers, though most of the examples shown are more static than dynamic data draws.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:12 PM | Permalink

May 8, 2006

New Way To Try Google Health (Maybe)

Garett Rogers reports and Philipp Lenssen reports on a what may appear to be some or all of Google Health, which we suspect will be coming this Wednesday. They both have screen captures of new query refinement that might be related to the expected lunch of Google health. I personally can't replicate it, but with some digging, Danny and I found a way for you to hit the underlying health filters.

Nico explains that he found a "Refine results" option when searching on a keyword. He snagged the HTML of the page and posted it here. Notice the additional filters:

+ Treatment + Research papers + From medical establishment + Symptoms + News + Alternative medicine.

Now, if you click on "Alternative medicine" you are taken here, where the query terms change to [migrane more:alternative_medicine] and not a simple search on alternative medicine. You can trigger these yourself, by adding these (i.e. more:condition_symptoms) type of elements to the query string.

It is also very interesting to note that in Philipp's post he showed that the link the Google Health result refinement takes you to is the same pattern as the refinement mentioned above. The URL he listed was "cx=disease_for_patients," which is the same as the one you get when you click on this.

So is this a sign of Google Health? Is it a sign of Google refinement OneBox results? Or is Google health using refinement filters?

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:23 AM | Permalink

April 7, 2006

Some Confirmation On Google Health

We've blogged earlier on rumors that Google might be developing a Google Health service and that Adam Bosworth might be involved as the "chief architect" of it. Now some confirmation from Google, which emailed me:

Health has been an area of interest at Google for some time. We (including Adam) have been doing a variety of research in this area, including how to improve the quality of health-related search results.

So, they're looking at it. What may emerge obviously remains to be seen.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:19 AM | Permalink

March 20, 2006

Google Health To Cure The World?

Garett Rogers reports of a recent Google hire, Adam Bosworth, with the title "Architect, Google Health." Garett asks, what would the Architect, Google Health do at Google? I have read some speculation that Google's enormous database can potential cure the world of illnesses. It can help be a predictive gauge for diseases to come, as well. This is all just speculation, but based on Bosworth's background, something may be up at Google.

PostScript: I wanted to do a follow up on this entry, because I was not able to provide sufficient time to it early.

There are many health related search engines out there. Here is a round up of some of the health related vertical search from some of the big players and he small.

1) Conduct a search on influenza at Ask.com, notice the Smart Answer built in. 2) Try Yahoo also, a search on influenza shows you a Yahoo Shortcut result from the health.yahoo.com portal. 3) Medline Plus contains health information from the National Library of Medicine. There are over 700 diseases and topics updated by experts here and some excellent detailed health tutorials.

Also, Dean Giustini has a good write up on how Google is changing medicine.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:55 AM | Permalink

January 6, 2006

Google Scholar and Medicine; Infotrieve's ArticleFinder Database is Now Free

A couple of items for web researchers.

First, Dean Giustini, a medical librarian at University of British Columbia in Vancouver (one of the most beautiful places I've ever been) and editor of the UBC Google Scholar Blog has a good summary of recent articles about how Google Scholar is being used in the medical profession.

Second, Infotrieve, a well-known name in the library world, has just announced that public access to their ArticleFinder database is now free.

What is ArticleFinder? It's a bibliographic database that also offers you the search, read abstracts and purchase individual journal articles as needed from a single source, this is what's often referred to as document delivery.

Content ArticleFinder has a lot of it. According to the web site, it's currently home to more than 26 million citations and eight million abstracts from over 54,000 journals, in science, technology and medicine (STM). More than 44,000 entries are added each week. This page has a breakdown of articles by discipline.

Search ArticleFinder offers two interfaces. One, a simple search box that can handle natural language and the other, an advanced interface that offers fielded searching (date, journal name, author, publisher, etc.). Another option allows you to narrow your search by discipline.

Fast Facts The ArticleFinder FAQ offers many more facts. One important note is that ArticleFinder does not search the full text of an article but rather the title and abstract. In terms of searching AF offers both wildcard search options as well as fuzzy searches. It's also possible to have your citations exported into one of three services and email results.

This service is more than worth a look.

Final Thoughts Two items. 1) The Infotrieve Virtual Library service (fee-based) allows a company or library to tie their e-journal holdings to he service. No word on if or when this feature will also become free. It would be great if did happen. 2) While much of the material in ArticleFinder is on the technical side of the aisle, don't forget that many public libraries offer great access (24x7x365) to thousands of full text article from journals and newspapers (licensed for personal use) for free without having to leave your home or office. More about that here.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:16 PM | Permalink

October 17, 2005

A Healthy Start for New Medical Search Engine

Even though searching for health related information is one of the most common things people do on the web, it's not always easy to find accurate or trustworthy information, especially if you don't know how to spell complicated medical terms. A new vertical search engine aims to solve those problems, and throws in some cool visualization tools that can help you learn much more about health conditions, drugs and treatments as well. More in today's SearchDay article, Curing Medical Information Disorder.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:00 AM | Permalink

June 23, 2005

Mamma.com Launches Health Information Vertical

Metasearch company Mamma.com has introduced Health Search, offering real-time search of some of the most authoritative sources of health information on the web. Results for many queries are categorized by topic (including definition, about, symptoms, causes, treatment, FAQ, news, help lines (when applicable) and a metasearch section. In many cases, a "second opinion" link offers an alternative source of information. The press release announcing Mamma Health Search has more information.

Mamma is claiming that the new service "conquers deep web," a boast a lot of companies have been making lately. I plan to take a closer look at Mamma Health and these other "deep web" resources soon, testing them on their own merits as well as determining whether they're really getting at true deep web content—or not. Stay tuned.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 1:30 PM | Permalink

April 18, 2005

The Mobile Searcher and Medical Information

The combo of mobile and local search is all the rage these days but mobile access to health and medical info/research has been building momentum for several years. In fact, the National Library of Medicine released a mobile interface to PubMed back in 2003 and since then has released several other mobile tools. This new compilation has intro info and links to the growing list of resources that NLM offers mobile web searchers. Since the topic is mobile search and health info, I recently learned that a mobile versions of the Merck Manual and other reference tools are available (free).

Posted by Gary Price at 3:31 PM | Permalink

January 5, 2005

Yahoo Health Beta Focuses on Searchability and Personalization

The Media Post article: Web Portals Beef Up Health Sections, discusses a new MSN Health and Fitness section and a Q4, 2004 beta release of an expanded health section at Yahoo.

Yahoo!'s key focus for its beta health site is searchability, and on the beta site, the search function is prominently featured. "With this new site, you're going to see search, you're going to see more personalization, and you're going to see more integration of content and community," Yahoo! spokesman Dan Berger said. Berger declined to comment on when the testing would be concluded and the final site launched.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:19 PM | Permalink

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