What would a “good” WebMD look like? • Hacker News Board

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#81

Post by david_allison » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:39 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #44

tmoravec wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So there's a private option that's terrible (WebMD) and a private option that's terrific (Merck Manuals). And it's the terrible one that ranks well at Google. Sounds like a Google problem and apparently only a Google problem.

It's a bit of a conundrum; on the one side, the NHS and (in a different area) MDN are better, more authoritative, etc sources, so Google should promote those. On the other, this would mean that Google can no longer cite neutrality or hide behind "the algorithm", as has been their legal defense against a ton of lawsuits where the suers said one websites should go higher or lower in the rankings.

Google already does this. Searching for "YMYL" (Your Money or Your Life) should produce useful results:

> For pages about clear YMYL topics, we have very high Page Quality rating standards because low quality pages could potentially negatively impact a person’s health, financial stability, or safety, or the welfare or well-being of society.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#82

Post by SilasX » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

jjar wrote: post #72

SilasX wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! But the first link you gave is just a list of conditions, which requires that I already know what my problem is. Is there a page that goes from symptoms to likely causes and what to do, like WebMD?

You can search at the top for symptoms: https://imgur.com/a/y5RUk5x I'd say if I were to suggest improvements the symptom search could definitely be better and more prominently placed. In the UK I personally (and I'd imagine most people) get to the NHS website directly from Google, which is better at finding more relevant pages.

That doesn’t really help. It just vomits a list of articles that mention coughs. The “killer” (rescuer?) feature of WebMD is being able to start from a symptom and narrow down through clarifying questions. You implied the NHS does this better, when it doesn’t attempt that feature at all.

I’m not sure this is the prime “UX done well for symptoms->cause” example you cited it as. Though I agree UK government sites follow much better UX patterns!

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#83

Post by mclouts91 » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:42 PM UTC

switch007 wrote: post #58

jjar wrote: post #15

A better question might be: Why is the private sector responsible for providing accurate health information? As this article shows, the incentives for people running medical websites and the people reading them are not aligned. I'd say the UK NHS website and symptoms/medications pages hit the nail on the head - https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ . It has no advertising and provides short, easily readable and actionable i…

One issue with the NHS is that I get the impression the information they publish that strongly respects their goals and desires perhaps to the detriment of patients sometimes. I’ve certainly noticed in the past big differences in advice. The NHS will downplay and not suggest investigations whereas another (non UK) site does the opposite. The NHS advice surely is carefully crafted not to cause unnecessary (from their…

NHS is focused on the appropriate allocation of resources to the problem. It strikes an excellent balance of doing the right work when necessary and based on probabilities. If you have evidence that the process recommended by the nhs is failing patients in statistically significant numbers I would agree with you on them not doing enough tests but frankly, I think NHS would perform very well if it was adequately resourced (it’s currently starved of necessary funding).

The NHS follows a strict set of guidelines for the identification and treatment of illnesses. They do not act like medical businesses such as hospitals whose goal is to do as much testing as they can justify to get more money from insurers.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#84

Post by Angostura » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

switch007 wrote: post #58

jjar wrote: post #15

A better question might be: Why is the private sector responsible for providing accurate health information? As this article shows, the incentives for people running medical websites and the people reading them are not aligned. I'd say the UK NHS website and symptoms/medications pages hit the nail on the head - https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ . It has no advertising and provides short, easily readable and actionable i…

One issue with the NHS is that I get the impression the information they publish that strongly respects their goals and desires perhaps to the detriment of patients sometimes. I’ve certainly noticed in the past big differences in advice. The NHS will downplay and not suggest investigations whereas another (non UK) site does the opposite. The NHS advice surely is carefully crafted not to cause unnecessary (from their…

I wouldn't necessarily assume that not suggesting investigations is detrimental to patient health. There is a continuing big debate in the UK medical profession about how over-investigation and over-medication/medicalising people can be a real problem in terms of patient health.

If you are seeing a disparity between UK and US in terms of advice about when something needs to be investigated, it could be that the US site is over-promoting investigations.

Keep in mind that the NHS puts a lot of work into prevention, into staying healthy without medication - it will quite often advise life-style changes, rather than popping pills - and that's for patient benefit.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#85

Post by ricardo81 » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:45 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #31

jjar wrote: post #15

A better question might be: Why is the private sector responsible for providing accurate health information? As this article shows, the incentives for people running medical websites and the people reading them are not aligned. I'd say the UK NHS website and symptoms/medications pages hit the nail on the head - https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ . It has no advertising and provides short, easily readable and actionable i…

That's a nice page, and I'll definitely bookmark that one. But I don't see most of the public using something like that over WebMD. WebMD is complete trash (I even block it in my Kagi search preferences), but it succeeds over sites like the NHS one because of blog SEO. WebMD is really a glorified blog with posts about every condition you might get paranoid over. I don't know how precisely they achieve this, but they'…

> Whether The Google

Indeed. You mention it being SEO but I see the NHS website has a nice site hierarchy and even has schema.org data.

SEO in one sense is to 'help search engines understand a page', maybe the crossing point is where it outranks and appears too much. A site/page ranking well in Google says as much about Google as the site/page.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#86

Post by petepete » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:46 PM UTC

hhmc wrote: post #40

ravenstine wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a nice page, and I'll definitely bookmark that one. But I don't see most of the public using something like that over WebMD. WebMD is complete trash (I even block it in my Kagi search preferences), but it succeeds over sites like the NHS one because of blog SEO. WebMD is really a glorified blog with posts about every condition you might get paranoid over. I don't know how precisely they achieve this, but they'…

I'd make the claim (without any real data), that the NHS has _such_ institutional power in the UK that it goes a long way to transcend any SEO shortfall it may have.

It does. Google treats gov.uk and nhs.uk sites as authoritative sources and ranks accordingly. We typically pay no consideration to SEO on non-campaign sites.

It doesn't stop ads from sneaking in above the results though. There's a whole industry of shady companies 'hijacking' and charging extra for free/cheap government services.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#87

Post by Cd00d » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:47 PM UTC

gnz11 wrote: post #27

Goes without saying, but "Don't google your symptoms." has been an unwritten law of the Internet since Google first became the dominant search engine. WebMD and its knockoffs have been hot garbage for quite some time now.

There's a standup bit, I don't remember who the comic is, where he says, "my elbow was kinda sore after I was playing a bunch of tennis. I looked it up on the internet and oh no! It turns out I have elbow cancer!"

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#88

Post by mrpf1ster » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:49 PM UTC

I see a lot of people talking about WebMD but not much about the prototype the author made to fix it: https://www.glaciermd.com/

I really love the website, it’s simple, fast, and very useable from a mobile context!

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#89

Post by rootusrootus » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:53 PM UTC

tmoravec wrote: post #39

ravenstine wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a nice page, and I'll definitely bookmark that one. But I don't see most of the public using something like that over WebMD. WebMD is complete trash (I even block it in my Kagi search preferences), but it succeeds over sites like the NHS one because of blog SEO. WebMD is really a glorified blog with posts about every condition you might get paranoid over. I don't know how precisely they achieve this, but they'…

So there's a private option that's terrible (WebMD) and a private option that's terrific (Merck Manuals). And it's the terrible one that ranks well at Google. Sounds like a Google problem and apparently only a Google problem.

> Sounds like a Google problem and apparently only a Google problem.

I want something like webrings to become A Thing again. A user curated search engine. And the users doing the curated need to be vetted. I don't know if this is even possible, but I get tired of having to come to HN to get a human recommendation that is miles better than the algorithmic crap from the current search engines.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#90

Post by dreamcompiler » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:54 PM UTC

jjar wrote: post #15

A better question might be: Why is the private sector responsible for providing accurate health information? As this article shows, the incentives for people running medical websites and the people reading them are not aligned. I'd say the UK NHS website and symptoms/medications pages hit the nail on the head - https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ . It has no advertising and provides short, easily readable and actionable i…

To extend this a bit, the ultimate solution is a quasi-government nonprofit organization along the lines of ICANN (or maybe part of ICANN) that operates a crawler and a database of crawled sites, plus an API for that data.

This would not be a search engine per se but a neutral backend that anybody could build a search engine on top of. Want to build a search engine and sell ads? Fine. Want to build a search engine specializing in health information subsidized by the drug companies? Fine. Want to build one as a neutral nonprofit and charge subscriptions? Fine. The same backend database works for them all. Even Google could build a frontend on top of it.

Yes it would be expensive. The government would have to pay for all the backend infrastructure (whether the government buys it or rents it from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc.), and Cloudflare and robots.txt would have to allow "icanncrawler" to access sites without friction. But it would finally allow the creation of neutral search engines not beholden to advertisers. It's a piece of infrastructure the modern Internet sorely needs.