If you prefer the interface, you can also try it from its Google start page.

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You can try it here.

According to the CSE’s main page:

Since many educational organizations and media outlets now host full-length content online, this custom search engine aims to make it easier to find quality educational content for students, faculty, and service providers in the health professions. Our goal is to quickly and efficiently locate videos, documentaries, podcasts, lectures, interactive flash content, and other educational media. Targeted topics include nursing, public health, medicine, physical therapy, nutrition, HIV/AIDS, epidemiology, medical lab sciences, communication sciences, psychology, etc.

Shawn also allowed me to post this list of the sites the CSE searches [XML] so you can see what sites his CSE searches. This allows you to not only build on or refine his work for your own purposes, but to suggest additional resources to Shawn (having checked that his CSE isn’t already searching ‘em).

If you like, you can add this CSE to your iGoogle.

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University of Wisconsin Department of Family Medicine physician Derek Hubbard, MD instructs family doctors on how to find clinical information [on the Web] at the point of care.

There are definitely some good tips for clinicians here, but a couple that make me a little uneasy (like using info from About.com as a patient handout).

Dr. Hubbard might also be interested in using the Consumer Health and Patient Education Search Engine.

[Hattip: Ratcatcher]

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Internet Cool Tools for Physicians is in Google Book Search

Stephen Francoeur made this little video:

The Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the MLA mentioned it on their blog.

The MLA’s Taskforce on Social Networking Software posted about it, calling it “…an accessible, illustrated and contemporary guide to online tools in medicine.”

Laika, whose blog has quickly become one of my favorite MedLib blogs, mentioned it, as did Creaky.

I’m watching WorldCat.org with interest to see which libraries are getting it (though Duke’s copy doesn’t show up yet).

Dr. Shock (MD, PhD) gave it a very nice review.

I’m lucky to count as friends people like Meredith Farkas and Michael Stephens, both of whom thought the book worthy of mention on their very popular blogs.

Gosh- Brandi blogged about it way back in August- well before it as released!

I’m pleased to see mention of it in languages other than English.

The President and CEO of Community General Hospital blogged about it.

It has gotten some buzz on Twitter.

We’re anxious to hear any feedback you have about the book- please let us know what you think….and what you think needs to be added or changed for the second edition!

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Hakia says they’re tapping the expertise of librarians. As CEO Dr. Riza C Berkan writes on the Hakia blog:

Every Web search starts with two queries. One is X. The other one is “who knows X the best?” Because finding X is not enough if the author of that page does not know X himself/herself. This will immediately resonate with you if you ever searched for medical, legal, or financial information for a serious case.

This was called the “credibility” criteria in the old world-order which has progressively vanished in the new age of Internet search engines. You enter X, and get the same “popular” perspective without distinction of credibility. You may recognize some of the sources, but are you an expert yourself about these things?

Ironically, there is a science for this. It is the science of libraries and librarians. That’s their job. They know what is credible, trustworthy, and commercially-unbiased.

So how does Hakia leverage librarian expertise? They say it is by indexing “quality sources” which are “taken from the Medical Library Association recommendations.”

That’s a great idea of where to start, but anyone could accomplish the same by making a Google CSE like this one. The Google Health Co-op greatly surpasses Hakia’s effort here by including a greater number of recommended sites and greater value from having more authoritative recommenders than just the MLA.

Also interesting is that Hakia has created a little micro-portal for each of the following sites:

PubMed – http://pubmed.hakia.com
World Health Org – http://who.hakia.com
ClinicalTrials.Gov – http://clinicaltrials.hakia.com
Centers for Disease Control – http://cdc.hakia.com
The National Cancer Institute – http://nci.hakia.com
National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute – http://nhlbi.hakia.com

Mayo Clinic – http://mayoclinic.hakia.com
familydoctor.org – http://familydoc.hakia.com
Healthfinder – http://healthfinder.hakia.com
HIV InSite – http://hivinsite.hakia.com
Kidshealth – http://kidshealth.hakia.com
Medem – http://medem.hakia.com
MEDLINEplus – http://medlineplus.hakia.com
NOAH – http://noah.hakia.com
American Cancer Society http://acs.hakia.com
Cancer Care, Inc. – http://cancercare.hakia.com
Oncolink – http://oncolink.hakia.com
Women’s Cancer Network – http://womenscancernet.hakia.com
American Diabetes Assc. – http://ada.hakia.com
diabetes123 – http://diabetes123.hakia.com
Children with Diabetes – http://childrenwithdiabetes.hakia.com
The Diabetes Monitor – http://diabetesmonitor.hakia.com
Joslin Diabetes Center – http://joslinharvard.hakia.com
National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases – http://niddk.hakia.com
American Heart Association – http://aha.hakia.com
Congenital Heart Information Network – http://tchin.hakia.com
March of Dimes – http://marchofdimes.hakia.com

These are also interesting, but superior results could be achieved using existing tools. Rather than searching Hakia’s portal for the American Heart Association for myocardial infarction, we could more easily search Google for myocardial infarction site:americanheart.org and make use of Google’s further refinements from there.

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You can also check out what other medical libraries are doing by searching the Medical Library CSE for ovidsp.

You could even seek out specific instructional materials by searching for Ovidsp (handout OR instructions OR “how to” OR training)

For what the biblioblogosphere has had to say about OvidSP, see this LibWorm search.

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PogoFrog is a Google Custom Search Engine, like the Medical Library Search Engine and the Consumer Health and Patient Education Information Search Engine.

Here’s how PogoFrog describes itself:

“PogoFrog.com jumps over the layman-focused clutter on the internet to find only credible medical information for physicians.”

So…PogoFrog’s schtick is that it skips over all that pesky consumer-oriented health information and zeroes in on information intended for medical professionals, right? But if one tries searching for “Ulcerative Colitis,” one finds that nine of the ten results on the first page are from consumer-oriented sites like MedlinePlus and Mayoclinic.com.

But if you REALLY want to use Google to look for physician-oriented resources, you’ll actually get more satisfying hits in the first ten listed results if you search for “ulcerative colitis” in regular Google. You can even select “For Health Professionals” at the top of those results to refine the search to sites tagged as oriented towards medical professionals by the participants of the Google Health Co-op.

The Google Health Co-Op has its problems, too- but it’s loads better than PogoFrog.

Not “Monetizing Social Search”
Dean Giustini describes PogoFrog as an attempt to “monetize social search.”

I disagree mostly because PogoFrog isn’t social. If it was one of those CSEs that allowed users to volunteer and collaborate, it would be social. It doesn’t…therefore isn’t.

Dean writes:

“PogoFrog also appears to want physician input, essentially another kind of social search.”

Asking for input or feedback from users does not make a service social. Lots of businesses invite users to suggest improvements¹, but that doesn’t make their services social.

Dean also writes:

PogoFrog searches across American .gov and .edu sites in medicine but notice that there are Sponsored links to the right of every search page.

If you have a problem with these advertisements, you shouldn’t be using regular Google either- they’re the exact same sort of contextual advertisements you see along the side of the page when you perform a regular Google search.

The only other monetization I can find on PogoFrog (which benefits PogoFrog instead of Google) is on this page, well away from search results, where links to “sponsors” of PogoFrog are listed.

I wouldn’t have any problem with this kind of monetization either…if PogoFrog was a useful tool. The TRIP database has advertising and I don’t think it detracts from the usefulness of the site (which, by the way, is a bajillion times more useful² to a medical professional than PogoFrog). The advertisements aren’t disguised as content and can be ignored if not of interest to the user.

So the real problem with PogoFrog is that it is a lousy tool with many superior alternatives.

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Hi David-

Thanks for putting together this useful custom search engine. Is it available as a Google gadget? It would be handy to add this to an iGoogle page.

Martha

Here y’go, Martha. Just click on this Add to Google thingee:

Want to add it to some other Web page? You can get the code here.

It’ll look something like this:

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Connie Schardt pointed out that it could be useful for finding handouts, tutorials and other teaching materials. Here are some ideas on how this might be done.

• Say you’re looking for PowerPoint presentations about Evidence based medicine. You’d want to seach for “Evidence Based” or “EBM” or “EBP” where the file type is .ppt or .pps, right? To perform this search in the Medical Library search engine, just enter:
  (”evidence based”|EBM|EBP) (filetype:ppt OR filetype:pps)
• If you’re looking for handouts about PubMed:
  handout pubmed (filetype:doc OR filetype:pdf)

Your turn: What other searches would be useful?

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Related

• Other posts about Custom Search Engines
• Consumer Health and Patient Education Information Search Engine
• History of Medicine Search Engine

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