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October 24, 2006

New Health Search Engine: MedStory

"There's a new kid in town
I don't want to hear it
There's a new kid in town
I don't want to hear it"

There are so many different health search engines available, you might very well be tired of hearing about the new ones. They start up, do very little new, and fail, quietly fading away. Most people just use Google, and why not?

For myself, it has been a long time since I was really excited about a new Internet search engine focusing on health. But. (You knew there was going to be a "but", didn't you?) But now there is MedStory.

This new kid in town is following in the footsteps of such other hot new players as Kosmix, ClusterMed, Healia and Google: Coop: Health (which has since been folded into Google proper). All of these use a new approach to searching called clustering. They allow you to enter a medical term, and then they make suggestions for focusing your search that are based on automatically grouping the results into categories of pages that have information in common.

This new approach is exciting, and all of these new search engines are worth exploring, testing, and comparing. MedStory is, however, the one that makes my toes tap and want to start dancing. MedStory groups items into categories that make sense for clinicians as well as the general public, and it is pretty clear which is which. They show you graphically how the results group, what are the main groupings within a top level group, who are the main researchers in the area, and what is complementary or alternative. Not only that, but the sponsored links are in a different part of the page, and actually labelled as "Sponsored Links". Worth checking out. Me? I think I might have a crush on "the new kid in town."

MedStory: http://www.medstory.com/

Posted by pfa at October 24, 2006 01:03 PM

Comments

Posted by: schnitzr at November 5, 2006 05:19 PM

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