It’s always been relevancy that drives the efficacy of search – that’s a no-brainer, and the reason Google is king of general search. But because that search is general, riffraff makes its way into the results, sometimes old riffraff, which is the very foundation for the rise of vertical, or niche, search engines.
But note also a BBC article link from 2004, a badge of slightly dated information, which isn’t exactly what a medical researcher wants.
It’s a minor issue, but it demonstrates that there is room to improve both in timeliness and category. We’ve also learned recently that three-quarters of American Internet users (100 million adults) inherently trust the source they’ve found online, without taking the time to vet the information.
When I was in college, the Internet had just become a grand public experiment – Website directories were still in phonebook format then. Echoing what are now mainly the chief criticisms of Wikipedia, professors shunned any information that could only be found online. You didn’t really know where it came from.
And that risk is still there, even if to a lesser degree. The Internet is becoming, at least somewhat, self-correcting with the advent of user-generated media and search engines that can squirrel out subject-matter experts. But again, growth from here will be found in the gaps.
Do another search for [brittle bone disease] at Healthline.com. Like Google, except with more emphasis, Healthline provides the medical terminology Osteogenesis Imperfecta via its “Medically Speaking” function. Additionally, below that are four links to articles from content Healthline has licensed from leading medical publishers such as Thomson Gale and ADAM.
These sources receive a “trust mark” to indicate that the information checks out. Below those results, are Web results – well, not the whole Web. Healthline searches about 170,000 selected medical Websites.
“Originally (when it was YourDoctor.com), doctors created content for the Health Map,” said Healthline.com vice president of sales and marketing, Bill McGee. “It was originally a content site, but it was very expensive to maintain the staff of doctors and editors for that.”
And thus was born a medical search engine with verified information results. Healthline provides a pretty good case study for an examination of the potential for vertical search. But also, vertical search becomes a base for directly marketing to people with a stake in your product.
McGee says Healthline can’t create enough ad inventory for the pharmaceutical companies. Centers that offer body scans or diagnostic labs, he says are “willing to pay a bounty” to bring in customers. “Cost-per-call is going to be very big in a world where people would pay to connect with customers.”
But this vetted-source vertical search thing isn’t the end-all of potential. Imagine, to stay with a medical theme, a user-generated network in conjunction with this service where patients review and rate specific doctors, hospitals, clinics, et cetera.
Healthline doesn’t offer thisyetbut I think I may have given them an idea.
“With healthcare costs, indices are going to be more important,” said McGee. He continued my train of thought to a Web-destination that included prices of certain procedures.
On a side note, McGee says the price of a procedure isn’t always reflective of its quality. A hospital running a half-price bypass operation is usually one that has so much experience and business, it can afford to discount.
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