Curbside.MD
Curbside.MD invites the clinician user ask it questions in natural language, as if texting a question to a colleague.
Some questions are answered much better than others, but the About page notes:
“Right now, Curbside.MD revolves primarily around neurologic diseases and drugs. But there is lots of content loaded from many other specialties in medicine – and it’s growing daily. We plan to have all of medicine ready and available for searching by the end of 2007.”
It looks like this will be a resource to keep an eye on as it develops.
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August 15th, 2007 at 4:08 am
This one will give tripdatabase.com (which I really like) a hard time!
M.
August 15th, 2007 at 7:58 am
Thanks for posting the link (and thanks for the kind words, Martin).
I think it looks a really interesting site and will, no doubt, occupy a similar space to TRIP. Although, aside from the natural language search it feels fairly familiar. I’m looking forward to learn from their business model – as we’ve not had much success!
I think the key for Curbside (and TRIP) is to get the search algorithm right (assuming the content is good). From experience I know that TRIP isn’t perfect (and can be awful) and I imagine the people at Curbside feel they’ve got a fair bit to learn.
As it happens TRIP will be releasing a new upgrade to the site in September one of the major features being a massive improvement to our search algorithm, it really is good!! This should push the bar even higher.
Onwards and upwards,
jon
August 16th, 2007 at 10:08 am
To me as a no-native speaker the “natural language interface” is usually more difficult than the “normal” one.
I’d like to know if a more structured seach interface (eg one that asks for PICO-style entries) is a) more user friendly and b) helps the search engine to produce more precise results.
Martin
August 16th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Hi Martin,
Have you seen this PICO interface for PubMed?
http://pubmedhh.nlm.nih.gov/nlm/pico/piconew.html
jon
August 16th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
You beat me to it, Jon! Martin- definitely worth checking out.