search engine person writes ” sends us a link to this very nifty medical meta-search enginehttp://omnimedicalsearch.com/
OmniMedicalSearch.com is a metasearch engine. It does not operate the same way as search engines like Google or Yahoo. Instead of assembling our own database of websites to present our search results, we return the search results from other search engines in various combinations. When you submit a search term, our metasearch software sends that query, simultaneously, to other search engines, websites and databases. When it returns, you are presented with the top results of ALL the search engines and databases you selected.
Rochelle says: I spent some time playing with it and really like it. Of particular interest to my morbid self was the image search function. Also notable is that there are no ads, and no links to pay-per-view articles. My cynical self is wondering, “what’s the catch?”
I like it…
As a nurse I like it because it returned relevent results when I tried several different searches. One odd thing was that it includes some HTML tags (try keratosis pilaris as a search a lot of strong tags showed up). That really is of little consequence.
As a librarian I like it because the sources are authoratative. I’m sure a librarian was involved because it actually uses the word authoratative!
I give it a 10, it is easy to dance to.
Not quite a ten
Performed quite well on some generic searches like ‘physical activity’, although it pushed some PubMed searches quite high in the results for no particular reason that I could see (why those particular articles as opposed to others?).
I then ran a search on ‘ecstasy’ and found the results quite disappointing. While some sites in the top 10 results gave a sober and accurate analysis of the effects and dangers of this drug, a lot were full of misinformation (MedHelp Q&A was particularly bad, presenting outdated results (c. 2000) from people who clearly hadn’t read the literature, and had a poor grasp of how to search MedLine.)
I’d suggest they ditch MedHelp Q&A from their search results, I’m not particularly impressed by that site.