U-MedSearch: A Meta Search Engine of Medical Content for Different Users and Learning Needs

Marco Alfano, Biagio Lenzitti, Giosuè Lo Bosco
unpublished
More and more people use Internet to look for medical information for understanding and learning but different users, such as experts (e.g., physicians) and consumers (e.g., patients), have different needs and bring different levels of reading ability and prior knowledge. Generic and specific search engines and specialized health sites either do not exploit the whole web or overload users with information of different nature. On the contrary, it is important for a user to immediately find the
more » ... formation on the topic being explored that has the 'right' amount of information and level of complexity. This paper presents a meta search engine of medical information on the web, U-MedSearch, that, for any keyword(s) provides four different lists of terms, and in turn web pages, on the basis of the used language (consumer or expert) and correlation degree (strong or loose) with the keyword(s) thus facilitating the search and learning paths of the different types of learners. INTRODUCTION Nowadays, more and more people use Internet to seek health and medical information for understanding and learning [3], [4], [6]. Different users, such as a patient, a physician or a medical researcher have diverse needs when searching for health topics and bring different levels of reading ability and prior knowledge together with a different vocabulary [7], [10]. Generic search engines (like Google, Bing or Yahoo) work on the whole web but make generic searches often overloading the user with the provided amount of information. Moreover, they are not able to provide specific information to different types of users. On the other hand, specific search engines, like PubMed 25 or Quertle 26 , only work on medical literature (mostly PubMed). They provide extracts from medical journals that are mainly useful for medical researchers and experts but do not consider all the information contained in the web that can often provide additional insights to the specific research domain being explored [5]. Another source of information comes from the specialized web sites oriented either to consumers (e.g., WebMD 27 , Healthline 28 or MedlinePlus 29) or professionals (e.g., Health on Net Foundation Select 30 , Translating research into practice 31 or MDConsult 32). Those sites contain very focused information but are mainly built by hand and then miss all the huge amount of information that is available on the web. Moreover, there is often a fee to be paid in order to use them. Internet users looking for medical information on the web for educational purposes would greatly benefit from a search engine that provides them with the 'right' information they are looking for without getting 'lost' with the amount and quality of information that Internet provides [3], [4], [8]. To this end, we consider two different types of learners, i.e., non experts and experts and two types of search needs, i.e., search for basic information and search for specific information. We have developed a meta search engine of medical information on the web, U-MedSearch that, for any keyword(s), provides four different lists of terms, and in turn of web pages, on the basis of the used language (consumer or
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