Top Health Search Engines of 2008

Mednar and GoPubMed have been voted Top Health Search Engines of 2008 by two independent measures.

Mednar is a federated search engine designed to quickly access information from a multitude of credible sources. Federated search is a new way to comprehensively search multiple databases in real time, ensuring a superior level of search results by ignoring outdated articles, irrelavant research and spam. Mednar offers several tools to narrow searches, drill down into topics and discover new information sources.

GoPubMed is a knowledge-based search engine for the life sciences and is based on PubMed, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 18 million citations from MEDLINE, the world’s most comprehensive source of life sciences and biomedical bibliographic information, and other life science journals for biomedical articles dating back to 1948. Once keywords are submitted to PubMed, the resulting abstracts are classified using Gene Ontology (a hierarchical vocabulary for molecular biology covering cellular components, biological processes and molecular functions) and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), a hierarchical vocabulary covering biomedical and health-related topics. Quite simply, GoPubMed enables users to find more relevant information significantly faster.

Searching for Health Information Online Dangerous

Approximately eight million Americans search for health information online every day [1]. However, the information those health seekers are reading may not be very healthy at all. A new study by the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest recently reported that the information prominently displayed in search engine results was not only misleading and confusing, but dangerous for patients [2]. Case in point: using two safe and effective prescription medications (Crestor and Avandia) as an example, nearly 65% of the first three pages of Google search results came from sites that were biased or contained unverified information. Add to this the fact that most search engine users click on a result within the first three pages of search results [3] and people searching for health information online are likely to be viewing websites that aren’t credible or trustworthy.

Health Highlights – October 23rd, 2007

Health Highlights is a biweekly summary of particularly interesting articles from credible sources of health and medical information that we follow & read. For a complete list of recommeded sources, see our links page.

Health Highlights

The Medical Blogosphere and the State of Healthcare Blogging

Healthcare Vox published an article earlier this week entitled “Is the Medical Blogosphere Dying?”, commenting on the number of well-known medical bloggers leaving the blogosphere. Although I don’t think the medical blogosphere is dying, recent events have been a catalyst for change and it’s definitely undergoing a transformation.

In Memorandum

The medical blogosphere lost two important voices this week. FatDoctor was forced to shut down her blog due to privacy concerns. Flea’s blog mysteriously vanished. Given that he has been blogging about his malpractice trial, it’s likely that his blog also was taken down because of privacy issues. Hopefully, we’ll see his blog reappear when the litigation has finished.