The Next Web

MEDgle proves popularity of medical search engines keeps growing

Written on August 20, 2008 – 3:17 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

The last couple of months, quite a large number of medical/ health start-ups have emerged. These sites are not without controversy. The following conversation about ZocDoc, covered by my co-editor Boris at TechCrunch 40, says it all:

Guy Kawasaki, who was one of the members of the jury, said ‘I just don’t see it. You search this site and you’re like, “Oh look, Dr. Molly Adams, she looks nice, I’ll ask her to operate on my heart.”‘. While the audience laughed ZocDoc founder Massoumi cleared his throat, grabbed the microphone and replied ‘You might ask your friend for an optometrist recommendation, but you might not ask them for someone who could diagnose the rash on your butt.”.

Massoumi could be right when he thinks health sites will be successful. Since even Google launched its own version in February, called Google Health. You can store and manage all your medical information on this site (This freaks me out by the way, what if Google suspends my account or something like that?).

Several start-ups profit from this move by Google. Like San-Francisco based MEDgle, a site where you can search through 10,000 symptoms and more than 2000 diagnoses. Just click the body part that’s bothering you and start browsing away to find a solution. MEDgle founder Ash Damle explains how Google Health helps them: “Google Health is a good opportunity for us. MEDgle was designed to be able to run on top of medical health records. Google Health now provides a platform for this. They have the data, we can make it actionable and relevant to the user.”

So the self-funded start-ups basically puts an accessible layer over the Google Health data. Users select the body part and the symptom, and then specify their gender and age. After hitting the search button, a page with a short description about the symptom and external links appear. A nice touch to this page is that users can rate those external links.

There seems to be a rather large demand for medical search engines like MEDgle. A recent study by Comscore showed that 60% of women looking for information about birth control turn to the Internet. Damle notices the demand when looking at the MEDgle traffic: “We opened the doors in June of last year. Last month we had around 500K page views. All the traffic has been organic to date.”

I hope you like that post!

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Google Health, health, medgle, vertical search engines, ZocDoc

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When customer support fails, SafeManuals and FixYa come to the rescue

Written on June 3, 2008 – 12:30 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

We’ve written quite a lot about alternative search engines on this blog. It’s more than just a healthy interest, as Boris and me traveled to San Francisco in April to visit the altsearchengines meeting. So for us, it’s close to an obsession. Why? Because alternative search engines are the pioneers of search. They shape the future. Although their engines aren’t always perfect yet, you can tell where it’s going. We think that’s pretty exciting. Sometimes we stumble upon an alt engine that already does a good job, like SafeManuals and FixYa. That’s even more exciting.

Charles Knight, altsearchengines editor, tipped us about these two services. SafeManuals and FixYa are aimed at supporting people with using those complicated home devices like DVD recorders.

SafeManuals

“Your sex-toy is stuck in « defibrillator » mode and you threw away the user guide to prevent your kids from finding it?” No worries! The Communication Assistant who mailed me this is from SafeManuals. This basically is a huge directory with 883542 manuals for all kinds of devices. From scooters to iPhones and from a flatscreen TV to an old-fashioned tube. And your sex-toy…

Although the interface is horrible - lots of ads and cheesy stock photos - the Google Custom search-powered site does a good job. Some user manuals aren’t available on the manufacturer’s page anymore, yet the guys from SafeManuals somehow managed to offer them as a pdf download. It remains weird though that a service that is focused on helping people out, doesn’t seem to spend any time on their UI.

FixYa

So what if you’ve found a manual on SafeManuals but you’re still stuck with a certain problem? Then you head over to FixYa, a knowledge base that is constantly updated by a community of helpful users who share their experiences of technical problems and solutions. The huge collection of solutions is filtered by a rating system, which allows experts to arise. Like IrishDruid, a staff member from Logitech who has solved 1395 problems and considered to be a “guru”. Not all active users are staff members, but it’s a great way for companies to see what kind of problems customers have and at the same time improve their image.

Different places, more results

These vertical search-engines don’t necessarily compete with Google - SafeManuals is even using its technology -, they offer different places for niche searches. So when you search for manuals in Google, you might end up at SafeManuals where you’ll definitely find what you’re looking for. Vertical search engines are popping everywhere and we’ll be an important part of the future of search.

altsearchengines, fixya, google, safemanuals, search, vertical search engines

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