Posted by Jeff Lash: Product Director, MD Consult
Welcome to our final installment of our week-long series on what’s behind the “smarter search” coming soon to MD Consult. Today we’re looking at one of the most exciting enhancements — Recommended Results.
On MD Consult, as on most web sites, the most frequent queries make up a large percentage of the overall searches. The top 100 queries represent 5% of total search volume. To put that another way — 1 in 20 times, a search on MD Consult will be for only one of 100 terms.
These are broad terms, most often diagnoses and diseases but sometimes symptoms. The most common search queries include searches like:
For these terms, there are tens if not hundreds of thousands pieces of content that contain the search term. Rather than presenting thousands of results, we will provide Recommended Results pages for which we have selected the most current, relevant, and clinically useful content for the most common searches on MD Consult.
These pages are organized by how physicians look for information to answer their medical questions — by Overview, Etiology, Diagnosis, Treatment, Management, Prognosis, etc. The Recommended Results pages also include links to relevant Patient Education handouts, Practice Guidelines, search refinements for more specific topics, and other relevant information.
The standard search results are still available, with the top 3 results from each section shown under Top Results from All Sections. Links to search results for each specific type of content along with the number of associated results are provided as well.
There you have it — the end of our week-long look at the building of a smarter search on MD Consult. To recap, here’s the five enhancements:
Thanks for reading and please let us know what you think of the enhancements!
Have you considered boolan seach capabilities?
Yes. MD Consult currently supports Boolean search — AND, OR, etc. We will continue to support the use of Boolean, and these enhancements that we are making will actually improve the way Boolean terms are interpreted. Specifically, our Improved Query Interpretation will enhance the way we recognize Boolean terms, especially for longer or more complex queries.