OrganizedWisdom
The Human-Powered Health Search Engine
OrganizedWisdom is a human-powered, physician-guided search service for health. As a result of the explosion of user-generated content, and the ease with which anyone can now publish, Web content has exploded. The good news is people now have access to great health information.
The challenge, however, is the Web has become a vast wasteland of clutter, spam sites, and marketing content that is mixed in with all of the great information and resources. Many of today’s search engines are having a difficult time filtering out the junk and delivering people the most useful results, especially when it comes to health information.
The mission at OrganizedWisdom is significant, but the goal is simple: to provide the best search service in the world for health by hand-crafting search results that physicians and consumers will recommend to their family and friends.
It shouldn’t be a time-consuming process to quickly find links to the very best resources when searching for health information. OrganizedWisdom solves this problem by adding the wisdom of trained expert search guides and physician reviewers to the power of algorithmic-only search tools and social bookmarking sites. This human-powered model helps deliver far superior health search results by eliminating search index spam from low-quality websites, links to duplicative libraries of licensed health content or potentially dangerous web sites.
So far OrganizedWisdom has created hand-crafted search results pages (called WisdomCards) on more than 10,000 of the most popular health topics, and the company which has more than hundreds of paid Health Guides, are working on the top 50,000. The service is still in beta-phase but it is growing quickly.
How to use the OrganizedWisdom search service:
OrganizedWisdom is adding a service layer on top of its search results. The company’s currently offers four main search services all designed to make it easier for people to get answers to their questions and the information they need:
1) WisdomCards™ – Search the WisdomCard Library which features more than 10,000 hand-crafted search results pages on the most popular health topics. Find WisdomCards on diseases, conditions, treatments, drugs, health products, doctors, hospitals, and even health companies. Each WisdomCard is created and managed by one of the company’s experts. The company is currently working to cover the top 50,000 health topics so chances are you will find a WisdomCard related to your topic, and in the instances when you do not get an exact match, the company provides results from Google, WebMD, Healthline, RightHealth, HealthVault, Healia, and PubMed so the user always gets a result.
2) RequestWisdom™ – Didn’t find what you were looking for right away? OrganizedWisdom offers a FREE service where an expert Health Guides will do the searching for you and create a WisdomCard on any health topic you request. You’ll be emailed your own WisdomCard within 24 hours or less. This can be useful if you want a WisdomCard on your personal doctor, local hospital, or a rare condition that hasn’t yet been covered.
3) RecommendWisdom™ – Each WisdomCard is managed, updated and improved over time. WisdomCards benefit from the Wisdom of Crowds because people recommend new resources that should be considered for inclusion on the search results. Each link that is submitted gets reviewed to make sure that they meet specific quality standards.
4) LiveWisdom™ – This service makes it easy for anyone to connect LIVE via chat with board certified doctors, health professionals, and health advocates for a per minute charge, directly from a WisdomCard. This service makes it easy and affordable to ask doctors questions day or nite. The service, still in pilot beta, is private and anonymous and does not replace a doctor visit.
Anyone can use OrganizedWisdom for free. You can search for WisdomCards, use the RequestWisdom service, or share your wisdom using the RecommendWisdom service. Soon anyone will also be able to chat live with a health professional directly from a WisdomCard.
In addition to being able to search the WisdomCard Library from OrganizedWisdom.com, the company is syndicating its search service to hospitals, media companies, and health foundations. WisdomCards are also easily found in major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
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July 29th, 2008 at 6:39 am
now that is a search engine worth using !
July 30th, 2008 at 8:12 am
Sorry, not impressed. I tried “amyotrophic lateral sclerosis” and the first of the “5 Great Resources on ALS” was
• Wikipedia: ALS
If this is supposed to be a health-specific search engine, it needs to do better than that. That’s basically just a Google or Yahoo-level result. I will stick with the much more authoritative MedlinePlus:
http://medlineplus.gov/
July 30th, 2008 at 11:21 am
I have just gone into this site and tried amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) again. I didn’t even notice the first time that what was I was given was “A Wisdom Card.”
When I tried to determine who compiled the entry, all I found was:
This WisdomCard Has Been Hand-Crafted by Tonya J
Not exactly helpful to the user trying to determine the authoritativeness of the info provided.
Nice looking pages, though—it is just that the results aren’t as useful as those on the same topic on MedlinePlus:
http://vsearch.nlm.nih.gov/vivisimo/cgi-bin/query-meta?input-form=simple&v%3Asources=medlineplus-bundle&v%3Aproject=medlineplus&query=amyotrophic+lateral+sclerosis
July 30th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Hope,
Thank you for the great feedback. In fact, I just used our RecommendWisdom feature to add the great link you suggested to the ALS WisdomCard. What will happen is one of our Guides will now review the recommended resource and consider moving it to the main part of the WisdomCard after the content is reviewed. This is one way that the community of users can help improve the WisdomCards in a controlled way so that all future users of the WisdomCard will benefit from your contribution.
You raise a great point about adding more credibility details about each of our Guides. We have just launched in alpha a new social profile for our guides so that can share more background about their experience level, background, education, etc. This has been rolled out for only a few of our Guides but we are in the process of doing it for all of our Guides to provide greater transparency, authority, credibility, and hopefully build more trust with our users which is paramount. So this is being worked on right now…
We’ve got a lot of work to do, but feedback and suggestions like this are invaluable as we work to make this the best service for getting health information on the Web.
Thanks again for testing the service.
July 30th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Hi, Unity–thanks for the detailed response. Pretty impressive customer care.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
OrganizedWisdom offers a FREE service where an expert Health Guides will do the searching for you and create a WisdomCard on any health topic you request. You’ll be emailed your own WisdomCard within 24 hours or less. This can be useful if you want a WisdomCard on your personal doctor, local hospital, or a rare condition that hasn’t yet been covered.
September 4th, 2008 at 6:45 am
Hi, Unity–thanks for the detailed response. Pretty impressive customer care.
December 11th, 2008 at 10:10 am
Hi, Unity–thanks for the detailed response. Pretty impressive customer care.