I just poked around and found an interesting Health search site that’s part of Microsoft Live. Although the blank landing page is a sharp blow to the senses coming from the nice Manatees currently inhabiting the Live Search page, once you enter a query, the interface is actually quite pleasant. I haven’t played with it for real, but it seems to populate some aspects (Conditions, Personal Health, Drugs & Substances, Alternative Medicine, and Nutrition, with others available through a link), organizes some featured content along with a set of links to medical sites, allows search results and searches to be saved, and shows some ads.
The aspects, also found on other sites such as WebMD are a useful tool for focusing on sub-topics in an exploratory manner. Unfortunately, they are not a persistent part of the interface, and most of them disappear as soon as you select one. Thus rather than being indepdent navigation aids, they are used to add terms to the current query, although those terms do not appear directly in the search box. Instead, the aspect is represented by a check box next to the result title.
There is also a way to save search results into a scrapbook that is managed by HealthVault, and every page seems to have a portlet into “webLab’s consumer selected lab tests.” I didn’t try HealthVault because it required me to create an account with them, and I am not sure how useful the webLab link is, since a good fraction of the people doing the searching aren’t the patients, and patients for serious diseases presumably get their testing through the health-care provider.
The graphic design of the landing page to the site could be improved (and made more consistent with the search results page) by sh0wing some useful content, such as common or trending health topics, for example, as other sites such as MedicineNet.com do.On the other hand, the search results on the Live Search Health site are formatted better than MedHunt, MedicineNet, OmniMedicalNet, and are comparable to WebMD.
The problem with the ads is that although there is a set of ads that’s set out in from the search results, there is another, longer, set on the right that looks too much like regular (presumably organic) search results. In addition, the ads injected into pop-ups associated with aspects are sufficiently context-free to be jarring. (Coffee mugs as related to a Coffee link in Nutrition with respect to colon cancer? Odd.)
These complaints notwithstanding, this seems like an interesting and potentially quite useful tool that’s worth playing with some more. It would be particularly interesting if some of the keyword searches could be complemented with Wolfram | Alpha style representations of quantitative data associated with various medical conditions. I am thinking of data that may be published in some obscure places, but that’s hard to find. BMI calculations that take into account your build in addition to your weight, growth charts for children, life expectancy statistics for various diseases, etc. There are undoubtedly many legal barriers to the unsupervised use of such data, but the data is out there, and surely there are good ways of making it available to the public.