Trusera: The Best Search is the One You Never Do
By Keith Schorsch

Great Health 2.0 companies like iMedix, Trusera and others, are focused on connecting consumers to great content. Trusera offers an online health network where you can find and share real world experiences with others who’ve been there. In doing so, we aim to solve the problem faced by millions of health consumers: how to easily tap into relevant, credible and actionable insight that enables you take control of your health.

Trusera is focused on the expert in all of us, linking consumers to real experience from people who’ve been there. To achieve that, we’re going beyond search to content creation, giving consumers tools to create the kind of content they themselves would want to read. Through their content, we then connect them with each other.  We’ve created a purpose-built online health network that utilizes the tools of social networking, personalization, and advanced search.
We believe that there are three key problems that consumers face in online health today:

Internet health information is hard to trust. We deliver credible content that gives consumers the information they need to make their own decisions about the information that works for them.

There’s actually too much health information online. We provide relevant suggestions based on our members’ own interests and needs.  Like Amazon suggests books relevant to you, we suggest experience based upon the user’s own actions and contributions.

Internet health information isn’t designed to help people take action.  We help people create useful content, the kind of content that promotes action.

Let’s take the example of a parent of a child with autism.  The first thing that most new users do when they come to Trusera is search.  A mother of child with autism might type in “autism family” to find some tips from others managing Autism.

Here’s a member sharing some practical advice about how autism affects families.  Three characteristics of our site give our searcher a sense of the credibility of this content.  First, all authors on the site have a name and a profile. Every piece of content has an author; there is no “anonymous” content. Using the profile, you can learn more about the author and see what interests you may have in common. Second, you can see when it was posted.  These are basic things, but they’re often missing in the anonymous world of online health content.  Third, you can see the quality of the content.  You can derive the quality from a thorough read or from a quick check against thefeatured popularity score derived from the community’s rating of that content.

One of the advantages of becoming a member of Trusera is that we make personal suggestions of content that may be of interest and relevant to you.  If our searcher then joins Trusera and adds “autism” as an interest in her profile, the site will surface suggestions to her about new, relevant content that fits her interests. Naturally, she controls whether or not that interest is public on her profile.

Lastly, we’ve created pioneering tools to deliver on our goal of providing useful health information from people that have been there. We’ve got three great ways to do this today.  We have Journals for daily blogging, Stories for sharing experiences and recommendations, and Questions for getting answers from the community. With each, we provide real-time coaching through a patent-pending technology called the Muse Panel.

In the Muse Panel, we’ve taken some of the principles of great content from our community and we’ve automated it. We’ve started with fundamentals of web etiquette—sentence length, proper case, paragraph length and keywords, and we’re adding new coaching continually. In the example of our searcher, she may just want to ask a question of the community.  She may prefer to share an experience in order to help the community, or our searcher may simply want to jot down some thoughts in her journal to revisit later.  In each case, the Muse Panel will guide her through the process.

Trusera is more than a search engine.  It is a network dedicated to delivering credible, relevant and useful information based on the experiences and insights of the community.  We have the advantage of being able to shape the kind of content that consumers want to read, not just the kind they happen to find.  After all, the best kind of search is the one you never have to do: relevant, credible, and useful content delivered right to you.  We leverage the power of the community, the power of ‘been there.’

That’s what Trusera offers.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Guest Authors, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.