Conventional Search Engines Ineffective In The Complex World Of
Healthcare
Healthline cited in recent
independent research firm report on healthcare search
SAN FRANCISCO – January 17, 2006 –
As more people turn to online search for health information, and as
their doctors have less time to spend with them, the challenge becomes
how to find precise, relevant information that can help people make
more informed and confident healthcare decisions. Search experts are
quickly discovering that meta-searching healthcare information can
quickly lead down a path of obscure medical terminology that few people
beyond those in the profession can decipher.
Nonetheless, today’s technology-savvy consumers are gathering
information from all sorts of sources, most notably the Internet, which
may or may not give them accurate data, since it’s an imperfect world.
On one end of the spectrum are general search engines that provide
millions of unfiltered results with no sense of guidance or order, and
on the other are limited medical content sites, which provide their own
content and thus restrict searchers by keeping them from viewing
content on the "Health Web."
But a third alternative exists – vertical search – whose goal is to
more easily cull complex information for users. According to a January
2006 Forrester Research report titled “Healthline
Uses Intelligent Content Search for a Healthier Search,” while
health-related language and layman terminology often cause confusion in
online search, innovative companies are applying software that can
“…make sense of content and recognize context, and understand the end
user’s requests for information.”
Healthline is the first search
engine built specifically to provide the quality, medically relevant
search results with navigation tools to help consumers find, understand
and manage the information provided. Because it was developed with the
assistance of medical professionals, Healthline also provides results
in context, so users not only retrieve specific results that match
their query, but provides a holistic view of interrelated information
such as symptoms, conventional and alternative treatments, causes, risk
factors, and more.
The Forrester report concludes, “As Healthline has found, integrating
one or more taxonomies, incorporating notions of authority and explicit
content ranking into relevance, and taking advantage of natural
language processing capabilities can ultimately lead to a healthier
search for end users.”
Company information:
Colby Zintl
Acting Director of Communications
Healthline Networks
415-281-3110
czintl@healthline.com
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