By Hope Leman

It is the time of year for annual “the best…” lists, so here we go with The Top 10 Health Search Engines of 2008. This list is in order of preference of the author of this article. Drum roll, please…

Number 1: The hands-down winner for best Health Search Engine of 2008 is Mednar.

A product of the firm Deep Web Technologies (which helped design another winner of this list, WorldWideScience.org), Mednar promises to become a standard tool of power searchers in the health sciences (e.g., medical librarians, physicians, health care researchers) and for savvy consumer searchers who want sleek supplements to such standard tools as MedlinePlus and PubMed. Mednar offers access to an array of databases that are simply not mined by other health search engines and features a dependable email alert service that enables users to keep up on the latest publications on the medical topics of their choice. Mednar is the Secretariat and gold medal winner of medical search at this point.

Number 2: GoPubMed has actually been around a few years, but made this list because it is such a superb tool. It is a useful complement to PubMed proper and those used to PubMed will love the ability to work seamlessly in GoPubMed and PubMed simultaneously, particularly to determine who the leading authorities are on particular topics. GoPubMed also features a mediated service that enables users to send emails to the researchers thus found, which is a public service in that it can foster fruitful researcher to researcher interactions and generate good will among the general public and those in the research realm.

Number 3: WorldWideScience.org. This is a product of the WorldWideScience Alliance an international, multi government-led effort and is a noble and so far quite impressive effort to create a global science gateway. Spearheaded by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), a unit of the Office of Science within the U.S. Department of Energy, WorldWideScience.org features English language materials produced by scientists throughout the world. Its strength is its staying power (drawing in such power players as the governments of the US and China) and its potential to fulfill the dream of those who envision Science 2.0 as finally enabling scientists to draw upon the brainpower of peers from every nation and institution in the quest for scientific truth and advancement for all.

Number 4: Health Sciences Online. Like WorldWideScience.org, Health Sciences Online is a multi-institutional, international effort to put as much valuable information onto the Web as possible. Health Sciences Online is more specifically medical in orientation than WorldWideScience.org and is geared slightly more to serving the developing world than the more general scientific audience of WorldWideScience.org and is more about disseminating information about best practices than facilitating basic and clinical research that is the raison d’entre of WorldWideScience.org. But both are exemplars of service to humanity and practical tools for finding ad-free, authoritative information on a huge variety of health topics.

Number 5: ScanGrants. Truth in advertising statement here: I work on ScanGrants and if you are looking for an unbiased review of it here, forget about it. But hey this is my list and ScanGrants belongs on it, as it is a useful, free tool for those in the health sciences looking for grants and scholarships in their fields. Researchers depend on money for everything from lab equipment to clerical help and grants are their lifelines to such funding. You can subscribe (via an email alert or via RSS) to the main feed of every grant and scholarship entered (this occurs several days a week) or by category—and there are huge numbers of categories. Every medical library, hospital, office of research administration and all universities and colleges should check out ScanGrants.

Number 6: SearchMedica. Rather similar to Mednar but lacking Mednar’s neat email alert features, SearchMedica features links to a wide variety of trade publications in medicine and articles in such periodicals are an underutilized resource by medical librarians and other professionals in medical search and by the general public. For instance, it is very edifying to read, say, an overview of the use of magnetic resonance imaging in the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in the trade publication Psychiatric Times because the article is professional in tone but not overwhelmingly abstruse and so useful for educated consumers and those who don’t happen to be imaging experts. SearchMedica is a useful midway point between the consumer level MedlinePlus and the sometimes overpowering authoritativeness of PubMed.

Number 7: Vadlo is a modest effort compared to the powerhouse governmental entities behind WorldWideScience.org and the big name NGOs (e.g., the World Health Organization) backing Health Sciences Online. Endearingly and charmingly, Vadlo says of itself, “Vadlo is brought to you by two biology scientists who wish to make it easier to locate biology research related information on the web. Vadlo search engine caters to all branches of life sciences. VADLO allows users to search within five categories: Protocols, Online Tools, Seminars, Databases and Software.” I particularly liked this line. “Databases will take you to, well, databases…”

Vadlo makes the list because it does what no other medical search engine seems to do. It makes available useful PowerPoint presentations that might otherwise be relegated to wasteful, indeed heartbreaking obscurity. Case in point: the useful PowerPoint presentations “Neckbrace Design for Patients With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)” and “Investigating Human Motoneurone Dysfunction in Motor Neuron Diseases.” There is a crying need for this kind of repository and search engine for PowerPoints on talks that contain information that would benefit a far wider audience than the groups of perhaps 10 or 100 people who happen to have heard a talk at a student seminar or conference session. Let us hope like researchers will submit their slides to Vadlo and that it will flourish. More power to it. Its PowerPoint feature alone makes it a valuable addition to the world of medical search.

Number 8: NextBio is most interesting in that it is a harbinger of things to come in terms of search results of the Goliath of Search, Google. I have been writing about search engines only since the summer of 2008 and it has been fascinating to see how quickly the results rendered up by new search engines like NextBio are becoming standard faire of the titans of search. Thus, it behooves medical librarians and indeed anyone in the health sciences who does power searches to familiarize themselves with tools such as NextBio in order to determine what to click on when its name comes up in other venues. In its own words, “NextBio’s mission is to make the world’s life sciences information universally accessible.” That is no small claim, and those in the halls of scientific academe, government science, biotech and the pharmaceutical industry will want to check out NextBio.

Number 9: Lalisio Literature makes the list because it is an attractive gateway to open access literature and open access, what with the passage of mandatory open access legislation worldwide (notably that passed this year in the US that states that the Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication), will more and more affect all our lives for the better—and render more and more valuable medical literature searchable.

Number 10: Yottalook. This is a top-drawer image search engine and is a model of search engine design in general. You can search for medical images by type of imaging technology used (e.g., CT, MRI) and Publication Date, First Author, Last Author, Journal and so on. This will be a boon to radiologists and other imaging professionals, to instructors in community colleges and high schools, to medical librarians trying to help nurses and health science students put together PowerPoints, among others. Let us hope that Yottalook expands into other media (I’d love to see them apply their admirable skills to podcasts and vodcasts) and other topics (say, a specialty search engine on neuromuscular diseases).

Other developments to check out in terms of talented people coming up with innovative health-related services:

Private Access is pioneering ways to streamline the cumbersome clinical enrollment process and thereby fast track medical research. What could be more important?

ResearchScorecard is a start-up that holds the promise of enabling users to determine who the most productive researchers are. Rather like GoPubMed in this but with the additionally incredibly useful capacity to see what grants the researcher in question has been awarded. It is still embryonic, but with luck it could grow into a tool that researchers, grantors, offices of research administration and headhunters in the life sciences would use often and extensively.

Emphasis Search is a promising tool for determining who the leading specialists are in certain fields. That will prove a boon to consumers desperate for the best possible diagnosis and treatment and for medical librarians trying to help such consumers and for physicians dealing with patients in need of the services of leading experts. At present it encompasses only includes physicians from San Francisco Bay Area medical centers. But it has potential and no rivals (that I am aware of) in this niche.

All in all, 2008 has been an exciting year in health search. Science 2.0 is making its mark on society and in search.