As announced, Google Health is live. You can try it only here for the moment.
Kosmix has a similar structure with Google Health, but has more subcategories (targets specific patients: kids, women), it lets you personalize the search and has much less results than Google (for [bird flu], Kosmix has 17,506 results).
WebMD has less categories than Kosmix and Google Health, their ranking algorithm isn't that good (an overview for bird flu is ranked #8, while the first results are about the shortage of flu shots). WebMD has a very good video archive and many interesting articles, but it has too few results (for [bird flu], it has 956 results).
Google integrated Google Health in their web search, but the categories aren't very well delimited and are easy to ignore. Also if you select a category, the Cache version doesn't work for any result (this seems to be a bug).
All in all, I think Kosmix and Google Health do a better job than WebMD, but Google Health wins because it has much more content.
More results doesn't necessarily mean better results. What's more important is that the information is relevant, trusted, and users have the ability to narrow down their search in as many ways as possible.
ReplyDeleteWell click on this URL, tries to get to the result #1001 on Google
ReplyDeletehttp://www.google.com/search?q=bird+flu&hl=en&lr=&start=1001&sa=N
You get this - "Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query. (You asked for results starting from 1001.)"
Now do the same for kosmix
http://www.kosmix.com/search?q=bird%20flu&t=vhealth.all&num=10&mph=1&out=health&sn=1001
You can judge yourself now how much trust to put into numbers