Pandia presents specialized search engines for health information.

There was a time when doctors were like gods and patients were willing to take any crap as long as the doc at least seemed to make an attempt to heal their loved ones.

Not any more. Now patients come armed with information from the Internet, presenting not only the problem, but often also the diagnosis and the cure. “Just write me a prescription, doc, I’ll take care of the rest.”

This democratisation of health care is driven by online sites like WebMD and Health on the Net.

The limitations of regular search engines

There is one problem, though. Specialized health sites normally provide information from their own database and — in some cases — those of their partners. What if you want a second opionion?

Then most of us will go to a regular search engine like Google and search for diseases or symptoms. Such searches may, however, bring up all types of results, including low quality, unreliable web pages — especially those marketing products of a dubious quality.

There should be a place for a health oriented vertical search engine that brings information from a large number of online resources targeting health, diseases and medicine.

Healia - a vertical search engine for health and medicine

The Healia health search engine was developed over four years with support from the US National Cancer Institute. It has its own database based on information from some 8000 sites  and a special search algorithm adapted to this particular topic and this type of sites.

Chief Executive Tom Eng has spent most of his career developing health-related information technology. “I grew up in a poor family without access to health-care information. Something like this would have been a godsend to us” he told the Seattle Times. His partents were immigrants from Hong Kong.

Does it work?

Yes, it does. We are not medical experts, but to us it seems to present relevant, high quality results.

Advanced filtering of results

What really sets it apart from regular search engines, though, is its advanced filtering system.

You may filter search results in two dimensions.

1. The search engine result pages will present all results by default. However, by clicking on different labels above the result listings, you may sort out results according to the following categories: Prevention, Causes/Risks, Symptoms, Diagnosis/Tests and Treatment.

2. But that is not all. In the left hand margin there is a long list of filters that narrows down your search to pages of relevance to professionals, females and males, kids, teens and seniors and more. You may also sort out pages with basic or advanced reading, easy to scan, fast loading, from URAC accredited sites and more.

Go to Healia.com.

Kosmix - an alternative

Healia is not the only vertical search engine for health information out there. Kosmix offers health search as one of several topic search tools.

Like Healia, Kosmix offers a filtering system, this one listed in the left hand margin only.

You may extract search results with basic information, definitions, causes, symptoms, treatments and more.   There are also filters for information written for doctors and a special section for “natural remedies” (including alternative medicine, diet and nutrition and fitness).

You may also narrow your search to information for specific patients, including children, men and women.

Like Healia, Kosmix has its own database, and Kosmix even lets you propose your site for inclusion in the crawl.

So while Healia limits its search to a limited number of sites, Kosmix searches the entire web. However, based on this search, Kosmix selects sources like “medical journals, research institutions, government and nonprofit organizations, general health information web sites, alternative medicine web sites, as well as what other people are saying in blogs.”

And yes, the Kosmix approach works as well. In our test searches we managed to find relevant and to the point information on topics like diabetes and allergies.

The Pandia Plus Directory has a list of alternative search engines for health.