Is Google Immune?
If a recent large round of financing by medically guided Healthline wasn't enough to give Google a scare, now Kosmix gets in on the health vertical search category.
It will be interesting to see which, if any, top tier medical institution chooses either of these players to power their internal search. If it means better search results for a hospital's online user base, "opening the doors" could prove to be empowering.
It will be interesting to see which, if any, top tier medical institution chooses either of these players to power their internal search. If it means better search results for a hospital's online user base, "opening the doors" could prove to be empowering.
5 Comments:
Kosmix has inked three partnerships with health sites: Healthia, HealthBoards, and HealthCentral. These are all consumer-oriented sites, so probably not what you're thinking of as a "top tier medical institution" . . . but certainly a step in that direction.
Mark,
I work at Mass General Hospital in Boston. We've had a brief chat with Healthline about their search functionality -- and how it would empower our patient education user experience online.
Many worried, however, that "opening the doors" -- and enabling a www search would mean that we're taking eyeballs away from our web site and driving visitors to the 'best' online health content, regardless if that content lives on another 'competitor' site.
My thoughts: vistor X just found our site from a Google search. they know what's out there. Or, visitor Y came to our web site based on our reputation and loves the fact that our health search engine returns the most robust, deep and respected health content available. Doesn't matter if that's from webmd, mayo or mgh.
Would love your thoughts.
Shawn,
I need a way to track my comments!
I think you hit the nail on the head: companies are realizing that it's valuable to provide a search on their site 'cause consumers go to Google, MSN, or Yahoo anyway. If you can provide them a better search experience on your site, then you've scored a big win. Also keep in mind that consumers want to see the broadest range of information out there, not just what's kept in a proprietary database. Because we crawl the entire Web, not just health sites, we find a much richer set of data then you'd get with proprietary data.
If you're ready to take a look at Kosmix, drop me an e-mail, which you can probably guess at =)
Hey Shawn -
Healthline has multiple years of experience licensing its search platform to top medical providers and payors, including Merck, Pacificare, and Henry Ford.
Here's the recent Pacificare announcement:
http://www.healthline.com/corporate/news/pacificare_powered_by_healthline_press_release.html
I'm not going to go out of my way to knock Kosmix, but I will say that their positioning around "searching the whole web" instead of "just health sites" should a) set off alarms and b) give you a sense of their focus (everything) vs. Healthline's focus (health).
I'd be happy to talk with you further about the health search space and Healthline's offerings.
All the best,
Tony Gentile
Its about time that these healthcare companies realized they need to step up their game. If you cant provide your customers valuable info then they will go to other sources.
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