Searching health information with Healthline

When we search for information on the internet, one of our first stops (most of the times the first stop) is the search engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. These are general purpose search engines; meaning, you can search for information on any topic. There are search engines that search and index information on a single topic, like travel, for example. Examples of such search engines include:

• Healthline (health topics)

• Kosmix (three different verticals – health, politics and travel)

• Chmoogle (chemical structures) etc

Healthline is one of the search engines for health related information. It has been around for sometime and it was relaunched late last year as a search engine for health related topics.

The basic difference

What makes Healthline unique is that they don’t index every health related web page on the Internet. Healthline only searches the top quality health websites, approximately 62,000 of them and growing. Of course, the major search engines are known to drop irrelevant pages, but picking the best is an altogether different approach than just dropping the worst.

There are some cool features at Healthline. Lets have a look at some of them.

HealthMaps:

At the top of a Healthline search results page, you can see one (or more) link(s) to “HealthMaps”. These are diagrammatic representation of the information on the keyword(s) that you searched for. If you are familiar with Mindmaps, you’ll love these HealthMaps. For example, lets say my search keyword was “diabetes”. From the list of “HealthMaps” provided, I choose “Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus” HealthMap, below is a screenshot

You can see how incredibly well organized the HealthMap is. Just looking at the topics themselves gives a whole lot of information about the term you searched for. It gets even better, you can narrow your search results by clicking on any of the blue boxes (the current search term is highlighted by the orange box), which will return you the search results for the term contained in the blue box.

That is not all. You can save, email, review, rate and print the HealthMaps. This is the best feature of Healthline and I love it. Healthline provides HealthMaps for 2,700 diseases and conditions. Just imagine the amount of effort that must have gone into this, amazing.

Trust Mark:

In the search results, you can notice that many of the web pages contain a “Trust Mark” next to them. They provide more information about the page to the user, mostly how credible the information is.

Tools:

The tools page is a mine of information on various health tools available on the Internet. They include a good collection of quizzes, calorie needs calculator, body mass index calculator etc – the list is very long.

Drug directory:

This is another impressive feature. You can get information about a particular drug. The information is mostly presented in question-answer format. If you are in a hurry, you can read just the first question, which is “What is the most important information I should know about drug X?” It gives you a quick and useful overview of the drug that you want to know about.

You can participate too:

You can participate/contribute and make the Healthline experience even better. Healthline allows members (you can register for free) to review and rate articles and HealthMaps. You can suggest new resources (websites) or report one of the existing ones if you feel the information isn’t appropriate.

Other Features:

Apart from the above mentioned features, Healthline gives you the other usual features too. You can create news alerts, save and email search results, tag search results etc.

Healthline is a very good service and best of all, its free