• by Shankar Gupta , January 4, 2005

Two major portal Web sites are expanding their health and fitness sections, with Microsoft Tuesday launching MSN Health & Fitness, and Yahoo! beta testing an expanded version of an existing health information site.

Among the contributors to MSN Health and Fitness are several big names in health care, such as www.MayoClinic.com, the Mayo Clinic's health care information site, Harvard Medical School, HealthDay, and iVillage Inc., a leading women's health Web site.

The nascent MSN site will be competing with Yahoo's current health site, which also offers searchable health news archives, with articles from MSN Health & Fitness contributor HealthDay, but without the health resource articles from the heavy hitters that MSN has signed up. Yahoo!, however, is offering a beta version--launched in the fourth quarter of 2004--of a new health and fitness portal site with more health resources similar to MSN's.

Yahoo!'s key focus for its beta health site is searchability, and on the beta site, the search function is prominently featured. "With this new site, you're going to see search, you're going to see more personalization, and you're going to see more integration of content and community," Yahoo! spokesman Dan Berger said. Berger declined to comment on when the testing would be concluded and the final site launched.

Berger also said that finding big-name advertisers for the health site was one of Yahoo!'s "top priorities." Several major pharmaceutical companies like Merck & Co., Roche Pharmaceuticals, and Wise Pharmaceuticals can be seen advertising on Yahoo!'s health pages. Pharmaceutical advertisements were one of the major growth areas in online advertising, according to a recent Goldman Sachs analyst's report.

An MSN spokesperson did not return calls for comment.