Medical librarians (especially those building Web sites and who need useful, engaging content to put on them), health science students, middle and high school science teachers and imaging professionals—you really ought to take a look at Yottalook. It is a free radiology-centric Web search engine and is not only a treasure trove of authoritative medical images and imagery-related material, but a model of a medical search engines generally. It is surprising that it is not better known. Let’s try to do something about that right now.

At first I thought the “yotta” was a play on words, as in “you outta.” Turns out, though, that “yotta” in a technical term for a huge number. That being the case, there are yotta reasons to check Yottalook.

Why am I so pumped about Yottalook?

Well, first of all, it provides a helpful screencast. It never ceases to amaze me that search engine companies spend vast sums on developing and marketing their tools but fail to provide something as simple as an online demo of their often marvelous creations. Yottalook’s screencast not only effectively showcases the undeniable merit of Yottalook itself, its screencast is an edifying primer on medical searching generally and could be viewed profitably by library science and health science students.

The link to the online demo is perched helpfully on the attractive homepage of Yottalook. And that homepage is a model of such. That’s what I like to see—everything I need to know about a search engine smack dab on the home page like the fact that I can search for images (and those that imaging professionals have deemed worthy of inclusion, not the mountainous mishmash of Google Images), links to credible information from professional journals and books and so forth. And even the blog linked to is worthwhile reading about both Yottalook and the state of medical imagery search in general.

Yottalook looks offers admirable levels of granularity. For instance, I tried the “Anatomy” tab with “hand.” I was offered all sorts of options for refining my search. Medical librarians might especially like the fact that you can drill down to the kind of imagery you happen to be looking for in specific instances: X-Ray, CT, Ultrasound, etc. And if you are trying to help a bright young housekeeper hoping to become a radiology tech or a radiologist someday, you can search for sites in Yottalook ending in .edu. For instance, sites like this one, and useful info for aspiring youths like, “Find a mentor near you who can help you down the path to becoming an interventional radiologist.”

The “Journals” option worked like a dream. I tried “ALS” and got my hoped for results on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and could narrow my search by journal and search by publishing date and author.

I did encounter one bug (at least in Firefox). On the journal results page a popup of an abstract would not go away as if to say, “Look at me! Look at me!” Try as I might, I could not rid myself of that popup except by hitting the back button. But that is a minor glitch and will no doubt be eliminated by the skillful creators of Yottalook. I liked the “Repeat Search in This Journal Only”—much as I love PubMed, in many respects searching in Yottalook is way easier (I hope I don’t get read out of the medical library profession for such heresies).

Indeed, I so impressed by Yottalook that I will end this review here, proofread it and zip it off to my editor so as to expedite the dissemination of the news of this utterly superb medical search engine. It is an exemplar of its ilk and shows what medical people can do when they put their minds to search (according to the About Us page, “Yottalook was developed and [is?] actively maintained by four radiologists: Woojin Kim MD, Khan M. Siddiqui MD, William Boonn MD and Nabile Safdar MD).” Smart bunch of guys. Let us hope that other medical specialists will develop such outstanding tools and that news of Yottalook will spread in the medical library and medical world generally. It deserves a place on the Web sites of all medical libraries and on the “health resources” pages of academic and public libraries. It is designed for imaging professionals, but that very fact ensures its credibility for lay power searchers and librarians. It is a nice complement to MedlinePlus. It is such a pleasure to come across gems like this.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 9:26 am and is filed under Health, 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.