• by David Berkowitz , October 3, 2006

I'll take search engines over hospitals any day.

I cringe at anything that has to do with hospitals, needles, blood, or doctors (my father, girlfriend's father, and numerous others excluded). Still, five years after my previous checkup, I recently decided to go for an annual physical, where the doctor convinced me to do have some basic blood work done. Last week, I called for the results, and everything was fine - almost. My triglycerides were slightly high. Where could I turn for more information?

The major engines are a natural starting point. Google offers a basic way to refine health searches for select queries as part of its main engine, but has yet to release its own vertical search site for health. Yahoo and MSN both have health sites (health.yahoo.com and health.msn.com); Yahoo Health is far more developed as its own entity.

There are some new health search engines designed for consumers, and we'll look at two today. The first is Healia, a recently launched engine that combines comprehensiveness, selectivity, and usability in a way I haven't seen previously. The other, for comparison, is Kosmix, an engine designed for several verticals, health included. On the heels of Healia's debut, I spoke with its founder and chairman Tom Eng and CEO Craig Husa.

Eng offered a number of reasons why he thinks Healia is more effective than other engines for health searches:

* It's entirely optimized for health queries.
* Its filters allow users to personalize results by demographics such as age, gender and lineage.
* Contextual filters help users drill down by topic.
* Suggested search terms can easily narrow or expand queries.
* The engine maps hundreds of thousands of medical terms and their relationships.
* It understands medical acronyms.
* It weeds out spam and scams in natural results.
* Advertisers are screened so only reputable businesses and organizations sponsor results.
* And it includes built-in measures of privacy protection (it saves users' previous ten searches but clears them when the browser closes).

Those are just some of the reasons. Let's see it in action by comparing it to other engines for a search on triglycerides.

Google: 5.5 million results, generally educational on page one, and it's clear which sites the links point to (that's not the case for Yahoo and MSN). Ads are relevant, though some may be questionable alternative remedies. There is no way to refine the results further (for broader searches, such as "heart disease," you can refine results via eight options such as "treatment," "for patients," "alternative medicine," and others).

Yahoo Health: 354 natural results, though the pages' authors are not listed, and most titles are vague. Natural results can be narrowed by type of information (e.g., medications, treatments, clinical trials) or topics (cholesterol, diabetes, urinary health). Yahoo offers links to sign up for health news alerts for the query and also a link to add the search to My Yahoo. Ads include corporate-sponsored educational sites along with several less relevant ads from comparison shopping sites Shopping.com.

MSN Health: 154 matches, with starred ratings. There are article titles, some of which have descriptions, but no indication of who authored them. Special guides on the left aren't customized to the search, instead offering "cervical cancer," "hurricane health & safety," and others. A banner ad for Netflix sits atop the page.

Kosmix: 8,355 results, with a few ads on top, at least one from a questionable source. There's one link from a relevant Reuters story, followed by natural results, which are a mix of educational links for varied audiences. The results can be easily refined by 17 subcategories (basic information, prevention, blogs, fitness, women's health, etc).

Healia: There's one ad on the right from the American Heart Association. Atop the 419 natural results, users can refine the query to be more general (glycerides) or more specific (tripalmitin, trilinolenin, tricaprylin). To the left of the results, users can select subcategories of filters, which, unlike Yahoo or Kosmix, can be combined. All links can be emailed. It's clear where each natural result points.

Healia's strengths show even more clearly with other searches. For a search such as "heart disease," a featured result (Wikipedia's definition) appears below the other search suggestions, and then tabs appear above the natural results, including "prevention, "causes/risks," and others. Tabbed options can be refined further with the left-side filters. Additionally, the difference in results for searches such as "diet pills" in Google and Healia convey how Healia is trying to provide information, not make a sale.

Healia does have its weaknesses. For misspelled queries, it either returned no results or returned a few with the misspelled word, but it never offered a correction (as for the others, Google, Yahoo Health, and MSN Health offered alternatives, while Kosmix did not). Additionally, some of Healia's filters require more explanation (such as "HONcode Sites" and "Privacy Policy"); they're defined in the help button on the upper right, but a help symbol to click or text within a mouse-over would be easier.

The competition will also pose a challenge for Healia. Yahoo is now the only portal with both robust content and a functioning specialized health search engine. Kosmix, meanwhile, is pursuing syndication deals, powering sites such as HealthCentral.com (Healia will announce distribution partners in the coming weeks). All the engines are making progress with health search - though Healia's founders point out it's not standing still either.

As for my search on triglycerides, it wound up being irrelevant. I called my father to tell him the results, and he discovered I didn't fast for 12 hours before the blood test, rendering the triglyceride count meaningless. When I can't reach him though, Healia's a commendable alternative. With Healia and others building better health search engines, I no longer cringe at health search results like I do at the sight of blood.