Okay, here is a tough test for a medical search engine. I am starting my test run of SearchMedica early in the morning before my workday and I am pooped and cranky. So it is up against a tough customer in this case.

But so far, so good. It has an attractive, user-friendly interface. I liked the fact that there was a check box that read, “Prioritize results by publication date,” given that one of my pet peeves with new medical search engines is that it often takes me several minutes to figure out that yet another search engine is presenting me with a hodgepodge of results all over the map chronologically. I want to see the latest stuff first as the default. Thus, I am feeling less cranky than I was a few minutes ago. Way to go, SearchMedica.

I also liked the fact that on the home page I was given the options of “Recommended medical sites” versus “The entire Web.” But I had no way to determine what the criteria for inclusion under the rubric “Recommended medical sites,” were. One likes to know such things so that you don’t inadvertently search an overly narrow number of resources.

And this choice seems to be as far as “Advanced Options” goes—which is not much of a choice. Not much granularity here. I mean, you are presented with a choice, but no real way to determine what you are doing if you go for the option, “Recommended medical sites.” This is sort of a “Let’s Make a Deal” searching. Do you go for what is behind Curtain Number One or for Curtain Number Two when all you have to go on is instinct? I always try not to expect commercial medical search engines to be as superb as PubMed, giving the commercial products the benefit of the doubt figuring that they will have something to offer that PubMed lacks. But I should be able to see in any medical search engine at least some of the limiters that I can see in PubMed (date range, language of results).

I tried Mednar a days ago (and it has neat, new edifying screencast—check that out—and why, oh why, don’t all new entrants in the medical search space include such things—seems like a no-brainer in the marketing line to me). It is easy in Mednar to tell what sources you are searching and power searchers who get their kicks by tweaking search parameters endlessly and to an obsessive extent can do so to their hearts’ content in Mednar. SearchMedica is lacking in that department.

With SearchMedica I have to rely on faith that its designers know what they are at. But maybe they do, so I will now give my search term, “amyotrophic lateral sclerosis” a go.

Now here is an interesting feature of SearchMedica. Way down at the bottom of the home page there is a series of options:

Tools

* Get SearchMedica For Your Site
* Home Page
* Suggested Searches

I decided to try, “Suggested Searches,” and searched through an impressively long list of such. Now that is something I have not seen in other medical search engines and might be an aid to consumers or health science students who are a little hazy on the very long or strange sounding term they are hoping to get some info about. The list might also assist busy clinicians who want a quick rundown on some condition and don’t want to bother with trying to get to the bottom of what falls under the rubric of, “Recommended medical sites” or who don’t much care about such matters but who simply need quick and dirty results.

So in, “Suggested Searches,” I clicked on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

There were some pluses among the results. There was a handy guide to the results:

Research/Reviews (4,352) Evidence-based Articles (257) Practice Guidelines (36) Practical Articles/News (409) Patient Education (1,127) Clinical Trials (1,239) CME (5) Complementary Med. (7)

That was helpful and not something you get in many medical search engines (although, again, SearchMedica’s rival Mednar provides similarly useful breakdowns of results).

Another problem in SearchMedica is that when I tried to sort the search results in my Suggested Search by date, I was not able to. So here again I encountered the perennial flaw of new medical search engines—the dreaded chronological mishmash.

Pluses: There were clear icons for PDFs (always like to be able to grab PDFs).

I liked the category Practical Articles/News and exploring that led me to a site that I had not heard of before,www.consultantlive.com and which was useful. I also got useful results for the sites of trade publications in certain fields such as Psychiatric Times and RT for Decision Makers in Respiratory Care. This is where SearchMedica shines—it is an outstanding tool for exploring what has been written about in specialty publications of multifaceted conditions such as ALS. I would strongly recommend that those facing illnesses that involve topics as disparate as mobility, speech problems, nutrition, and depression try a search in SearchMedica to see how medical professionals try to reach out to those in other specialties to educate one another about how best to approach the many aspects of such conditions. Everything is interrelated these days. PubMed doesn’t tend to cover trade publications and there is often solid information in publications designed for physical therapists, respiratory therapists, dietitians and so on that can help patients and health educators. Kudos to SearchMedica for rendering such gems findable. I don’t know of any other medical search engine that is doing this or at least this well.

I likewise got good results for the Patient Education category (e.g., links to such reputable sources as the ALS Association, MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia and specialty sites such as that of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association). Again, that is a real plus of using SearchMedica—access to articles from a wider range of professional associations than it has been my experience to see in MedlinePlus or in other medical search engines. For instance, I was pleased to come across the moving and useful article Voice Lessons–Speaking With ALS which I would not have discovered but for the Patient Education category of SearchMedica. Consumers and those in public health or primary care or family medicine and nursing students might find SearchMedica a helpful tool in obtaining general articles on a wide range of topics. This pathway to simple but useful info sets SearchMedica apart from other medical search engines and online patient communities.

All in all, I would say that medical librarians, public health educators and consumers should explore SearchMedica. In terms of marketing, it needs a screencast and more info about its features and the rationale for its creation (again Mednar surpasses SearchMedica in these respects) and to stress its strong point: the links to specialty sites and trade publications. I am much less cranky now than when I started this review. I always like to encounter search engines that do things that their rivals are not doing (as Mednar does with the Deep Web and its many useful but little known databases) and SearchMedica does that in several ways and I found some interesting, useful stuff while using it—not a bad start for SearchMedica.

-Hope Leman