Last night I was at a party and saw a friend who woks for the online medical search tool, HealthLine. He cracked open his laptop at about 9PM, and while some rushed to mock his Silicon Valley addiction..."what, you can't make it two hours without being close to a computer?"...I knew he was looking for this NY Times article on his company. Congrats to the HealthLine folks, since this is the kind of coverage you work very hard to get.
Anyway, HealthLine's premise is simple:
If you search Google you get a really broad set of results, much of which can be discarded due to irrelevance.
If you search on the most popular medical search site, WebMD, you get very relevant information, from a very limited set of resources.
So, they want to provide more relevant info.
Sounds good, no?
I blogged recently about using WebMD to check on my green phlegm (aren't you glad I found a way to bring that up again?!) So I thought I'd do the search on all three tools and compare...
cough+green+phlegm on Google: I'm a Google fan. I readily admit it. If you use 2 or more words in your search (as more and more people do) then your results are typically going to be pretty relevant. There are two Google ads, but over on the side, where I swear I don't even notice them. This search brought up completely relevant results on Page 1. Now, all of the URLs look like they belong to reputable sources, but if I'm honest, I'll have to admit I have no idea how reputable those sources are. I notice WebMD doesn't show up in the first few pages...which strikes me as odd, since they're the acknowledged leader in medical information online.
cough+green+phlegm on WebMD: These are the results I talked about, advising me that time, not anti-biotics, was the answer. Of course I had some readers who implied that WebMD's expert on this subject matter is always anti-anti-biotics...and they didn't buy it. Anyway, there are two "sponsored links" (meaning ads) at the top of the list, then a brief selection of articles, the first two of which look pretty relevant, but the next two deal with smoking, so not what I was looking for.
cough+green+phlegm on HealthLine: These results are pretty fascinating. Up at the top they have options to broaden (like: pneumnia symptoms) or narrow (cough treatments) your search. I like that. This reminds me of back when NorthernLights was a good search engine to use because it grouped results into general themes or directions. I know there are other search tools that do this now, but I tend to go for multiple word searches on Google instead.
HealthLine then does have two Google ads, although they are not as obtrusive as WebMD's.
Then they have their organic search results. This doesn't look much different than a Google results page, except for the little notations called "Trust Marks" So this is how HealthLine addresses the issue: how do I know sites are reputable? They have different kinds of Trust Marks and a little pop-up window explains what each Trust Mark, from "Doctor-reviewed" to "HONcode" means.
There's more to the HealthLine site, and I'm going to make a point to continue comparing these tools when searching for health-related information.
The reason I (and many others) think Google has won, thus far, the general search wars is because of their cleaner-than-clean interface and design. WebMD, on the other hand, has that typical consumer site overly cluttered and busy design that I personally eschew. HealthLine is thus far closer to the clean, further from the cluttered.
Ant that just might win it my health-related searches!
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