By Hope Leman

Everything’s coming up veggies. Here are two cute little nutrition search engines that might be of interest to consumer health librarians and medical librarians who keep track of such things for diabetes educators, dietitians and nutritionists. Vegetarians and the generally health conscious/fitness minded among us might want to give them a spin, too.

The first is Fealth. It has a clean, indeed rather stark, home page. I tried “Vitamin C” as my search term and got some interesting but not spot-on results.

For instance, one of the top results was for Vitamin D, not C and the link to a page in Revolution Health had expired—but it was an interesting detour, as I had not really looked at Revolution Health and decided to try out its own search feature. I tried “Vitamin C” in the search box of its home page.

Sure didn’t like the heavy handed plugging of Revolution Health’s own merchandise—the seventh item was its branded Vitamin C supplement. Creepy to have a health site be that blatant with product placement. Revolution’s Health’s rivals like MedHelp, Wellsphere, Organized Wisdom and Healthline are much more restrained and therefore much more likely to be recommended to consumers by librarians—who can influence resource choices among consumers, Mr. Case. You make Google appear demure by comparison.

Fealth could use some work. If it is going to be about nutrition it is going to have to provide better results on search terms like Vitamin C, Vitamin B, Vitamin D, etc. I got some very quirky results—something on malaria but nothing on the basic facts from, say, MedlinePlus. And I was told at first, “Health Search Results. 51-52 (out of about 518 total pages)…” but things came to a screeching halt at about page six, “Ooops….Document not found. Please try again with valid request or URL.”

Note to search engine developers: Please don’t say, “Ooops” as if it is my fault that your search engine is being weird. Just say you are sorry and I will forgive you. Why did it stop at 52? I have no idea. Why tantalize me with 518 and then stop at 52?

Still, good for it for trying—and it didn’t shove ads in my face among the search results.

V3GGIE far, far surpassed Fealth in the relevancy sweepstakes. And even though most of the results were somehow connected to commercial enterprises (e.g.., Whole Foods) the information was passable if lightweight. But there are definitely bugs to be worked out—there were many repeats of the initial results and I kept having to go back to the previous pages to verify that the results were indeed redundant.

V3GGIE would probably be most useful for those interested in exploring and dissecting the social anthropology and demographics of the mainstream vegetarian branch of today’s bourgeoisie.

Just as well that there are so many search engines to compare in the nutrition category, given that Vitamin D alone is generating so much excitement these days on so many fronts. And in the medical library where I work, consumers often ask what specific foods they should eat in order to maximize intake of such and such a vitamin. V3GGIE is a handy gateway to the sites of outlets that sell such items and a repository of recipes for those with special dietary needs.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Reviews, 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.