MedSearch: a specialized search engine for medical information

ABSTRACT

People are thirsty for medical information. Existing Web search engines cannot handle medical search well because they do not consider its special requirements. Often a medical information searcher is uncertain about his exact questions and unfamiliar with medical terminology. Therefore, he prefers to pose long queries, describing his symptoms and situation in plain English, and receive comprehensive, relevant information from search results. This paper presents MedSearch, a specialized medical Web search engine, to address these challenges. MedSearch can assist ordinary Internet users to search for medical information, by accepting queries of extended length, providing diversified search results, and suggesting related medical phrases.

REFERENCES

• 1: Full version of this paper is available at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~gangluo/medsearch.pdf.
• 2: A. Spink, Y. Yang, and J. Jansen et al. A Study of Medical and Health Queries to Web Search Engines. Health Information and Libraries Journal 21(1): 44--51, 2004.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Search process

General Terms:
Algorithms, Experimentation

Keywords:
medical Web search engine, medical query