Physicians, health professionals and the general public are increasingly turning to the internet as a source of medical information. Rapid and unimpeded access to validated, accurate, digestible and easily retrievable health information is an essential tool in the care-giving belt of the astute medical professional.
We have previously looked at some of the most useful medical search engines to find and interrogate health information, but sometimes it is hard to keep up with the explosion in alternative means of swimming through the health information overload.
The big Boys – General Search
In many cases, personal preference, rapidity of page load time and familiarity with the search interface lead health professionals to determine that Dr Google beats Dr Bing. However, I suggest directly checking your search results using a search engine aggregator such as Zuula.com or a trial a blinded comparative search engine such as No Brand Search before making any assumptions – biggest is not always best!
Google: Google still retains the lions share of search in general, which directly correlates to direct search for health and medicine. Unfortunately I am not finding the search results as useful or relevant any more, with many of the top results being hopelessly out of date and the more important information being lost deep in the search pages.
Bing: Google now has a new rival when it comes to online searches for health information as Microsoft’s Bing search engine launches an integral ‘Bing Health’ search function.
The new enhanced Bing Health search experience is live – focusing on further enabling people to quickly get relevant information and make better decisions. – Alain Rappaport, Microsoft’s General Manager of Health Search
Yahoo: Yahoo search has improved greatly over the last 18 months and has a dedicated ‘health search‘ section like Google, but it’s cluttered interface and slow loading time in the hospital setting often leads to frustration.
Hitwise search results
Top 5 Search for Health Professionals
GoPubMed.org is an amazing piece of search architecture. It is a knowledge-based search engine for biomedical texts based on GO (gene ontology) and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). Retrieves PubMed in the categories of ‘What, Who, Where or When’.
SearchMedica is a health professional search engine which scans reputable journals, systematic reviews, and evidence-based articles to provide search results. Although SearchMedica displays fewer results than standard search engines, I found the return to be very accurate, clinically relevant and comprehensive.
HealthMash™ combines sophisticated Web 2.0 universal search and discovery technology with Semantic Web Concepts in a simple yet highly informative user interface. It runs a similar meta interface to the ScienceRoll and All Plus search engines. It is still in beta, and I still find All Plus to be more accurate at this stage.
Mednar is a one-stop federated search engine for professional medical researchers to access information across a multitude of credible sources. Researchers use Mednar’s many tools to refine their searches, drill down and discover new information sources.
TRIP Database and Trip Answers are a clinical search tools designed to allow health professionals to rapidly identify the highest quality clinical evidence for clinical practice. Registered users have extra features such as CPD, search history, and collaborative tools.
Things have not moved too far since I wrote the Top Bedside Health Search Engines for 2008 with Hope Leman and the release of the Top 50 Health Search Engines in 2009 by AltSearchEngines.
However, in addition to the sites listed above it is well worth looking at some other sites including:
- HealthBase: The first publicly available application built on NetBase’s Content Intelligence platform, which reads every sentence inside every document from more than nine billion Web pages. Still definitely in beta testing, it is well worth a look at the ‘treatments’, causes and complications structure to the mapping process
- Hakia Health: Powered by librarians, this search focuses on taking the clutter out of your queries and getting you pretty accurate results
- PogoFrog: Medical Research Engine for Health Professionals
- Health Sciences Online:
- OmniMedical Search:
- MedStory: Smart medical search engine , aimed to save time when looking for certain medical topics by giving the users a chance to explore related topics to get focused results .
…or just get a second life!
Some Alternative Alternatives
Quest for Cures is a specialized health search engine dedicated to searching for cures/effective treatments to rare or common diseases. Search and analyze the contents deeper than other health search engines.
HealthFind is a specialized search engine. It uses Google Custom search to look up in selection of medical and health sites specialising in alternative/complementary medicine.
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About Mike Cadogan
Another superb search article Mike and a great resource for Health Professionals.
well health mash is one of the best search engines.
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