Last fall, the world got a bemused chuckle at the news that a team of doctors used Google to come up with the right diagnosis for a majority of 26 difficult medical cases. The story underlined the fact that Google indexes more than three billion medical articles—an array of content that has to be helpful, even to highly specialized searchers.
But in reality, practicing physicians find Google, or any general search engine, difficult to use for research simply because they do contain so much data, and so much of it is aimed at non-professional audiences. A doctor doing a general search on “Hodgkin’s disease” or “depression” is going to have to wade through a lot of treatment center Web sites and information clearinghouses before finding clinical studies or authoritative practice guidelines. A doctor searching for information about “mesothelioma”—reportedly the most competitive keyword among personal-injury lawyers—will probably just give up.
CMPMedica, which publishes medical journals in 14 professional specialties, has begun to address the physician audience with a vertical search engine tailored for healthcare professionals and offering only authoritative, peer-reviewed research. In fact, SearchMedica is planned as a series of B-to-B search sites devoted to different medical specialties.
Product manager Cyndy Finnie says the search engine grew out of CMPMedica’s own search, for a way to grow its online enterprise. The company began surveying doctors about their online research habits and found that while the majority was using Google or other general search—more than 90% of those 45 or under, in fact—the majority of that group also complained of a flood of irrelevant results.
“Psychiatric Times is the best-read publication among practicing psychiatrists,” Finnie says. “So we worked with their medical editors and the doctors on their advisory board to identify credible medical Web sites, with content aimed at practitioners, not consumers.” CMP indexed that content using a search engine from Convera Technology, and last fall, SearchMedica Psychiatry was launched in the U.S. In mid-January 2007, the Web site launched a search for primary care physicians, and another search for oncological treatment is planned for later this year. (CMPMedica is owned by United Business Media, a British company, which actually rolled out SearchMedica U.K. before launching on these shores.)
While both the psychiatry and primary care indexes contain articles from CMPMedica’s publications, the bulk of the data comes from outside Web sources identified by the medical advisory boards involved. SearchMedica Psychiatry includes pages from 150 Web sites deemed authoritative; SearchMedica Primary Care indexes 300 Web sites right now and will grow to include more as users suggest other sources of quality information.
The value proposition to doctors is a database that has been culled of irrelevant information. For example, a psychiatrist treating bipolar disorder can use the SearchMedica engine to look for articles on “rapid cycling”—the term for patients moving from mania to depression and back—without having to wade through pages of results on Lance Armstrong or the Tour de France. Finnie cites a recent e-mail from a psychiatric nurse who appreciated being able to search on the keyword “hoarding” and not get back thousands of results about squirrels storing nuts for the winter.
In fact, since both SearchMedica engines are aimed at practicing physicians, they also exclude the reams of medical papers and articles written about research done on laboratory animals.
SearchMedica results are ranked by relevance to a keyword, just as results on the general search engines are. But that’s where the similarity ends. “Google introduces a measure of popularity to its organic results, so sites that get linked to more often get moved to the top of the results page,” Finnie says. “In the B-to-B market, that’s not a useful feature because doctors want information about conditions and treatments that may not be very popular.”
To the left of the results page, doctors will also find their search results classified into categories they may find useful for drilling down, such as news, research reviews, evidence-based articles, practice guidelines and clinical trials. Doctors can also vote on the usefulness of specific results and offer comments using an Ajax pop-up underneath every listing.
In most cases, users can click on a result and be taken to the Web site to read the full article. But some influential publications such as the Journal of the American Medical Association or the New England Journal of Medicine don’t permit the full article to be displayed online. In those cases, SearchMedica links to PubMed.com, a Web site run by the National Institutes of Health on which article abstracts and case summaries are made available.
The SearchMedica searches are free to users and earn their revenue from sponsorships and pay-per-click keyword ads, just as the general engines do. The text-based ads, some with logos, are displayed on the right rail under a “Sponsored Links” heading, adhere to IAB format standards, and come two to a results page maximum.
SearchMedica’s ad model is actually a hybrid version that combines area sponsorship with a pay-per-click ad format. CMPMedica has created “buckets” of keywords surrounding important content areas within its search indexes—for example, around “schizophrenia” in the psychiatric engine. Advertisers sponsor those keyword groups and earn the right to the first PPC ad on the page covered by that therapeutic area.
The hybrid ad model is at least partly a function of the appeal the medical vertical has for some big advertisers, notably the pharmaceutical companies. “We started pitching to pharma companies and their online agencies last fall and found they were very excited about it,” Finnie says. “One product manager told us that she’d been trying to talk to Google and Yahoo! for years about isolating doctors for ad targeting. Marketers can sometimes do that on the general engines by buying very technical keywords, but by and large, if you buy a keyword there, you don’t know who’s clicking on it.
“At SearchMedica, the nature of the content is going to determine who our users are, and that will produce much more qualified leads for advertisers.”
The next SearchMedica launch will “almost certainly” be a cancer-specific search engine later this year, Finnie says. Beyond that, CMPMedica is letting its users vote on the next medical specialty ripe for vertical search, from a list of fields ranging from anesthesiology to urology.