What the Search Insiders don’t know
Great post to MEDLIB-L today from David Dillard, pointing out this article by David Berkowitz, author of the “Search Insider” column for MediaPost
Berkowitz writes:
The better mousetrap people need is a health search engine.
If you look at any searcher who enters more than ten unique searches, at least one will likely be health-related. People are trying to take care of themselves, their kids, and their parents, and the search records can be heart-wrenching, such as one string from a woman (17239996) who gradually became convinced that one of her twin babies had autism. Anecdotally, people searching for health information repeat and refine those searches far more than they do for other queries. There’s limitless opportunity to help searchers here.
I’m confused. How is it that a “Search Insider” not only doesn’t know about the existing portals for health information searching, but that he didn’t try a few google searches to seek them out. A few searches that he might have tried:
“Health Search”
“Medical Search”
“Health Information”
(Some consumer information portals are listed here in a previous post on this blog. In his post to MEDLIB-L today, David Dillard points to a list of several more, but I note that a number of these really aren’t geared towards consumer use. Regardless, there are a ton of interesting resources listed here that I’ll be combing through.)
Sure, there’s loads of room for improvement in consumer health searching, and Dean Giustini’s work on the need for Google Medicine clearly lays out the need for improved search portals for health professionals, but as David Dillard writes:
It never ceases to amaze as to what professionals in the internet industries do not know about bibliographic databases and website indexing sources on the internet…
I share Mr. Dillard’s amazement.
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August 20th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
THis is the same exact thing that I was talking about yesterday with overhearing conversations about, “needing to find a way to better index the Wikipedia” and “having some sort of way to add authority to it.” Um..hello…librarians have been using authority control and controlled vocabularies for indexing purposes forever! Maybe we can help.
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:56 am
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