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What would a “good” WebMD look like?

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

#181

Post by scarby2 »

biztos wrote: post #91
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'…

> The Google continues to put them near the top of results after all these years. WebMD: the Pinterest of Health.

i wish pintrest could be scrubbed from the internet

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

#182

Post by boboralice »

biztos wrote: post #97
stevage wrote: post #17

The phenomenon they describe for health information is, IMHO, absolutely rife across many different domains. Try looking up information about gardening, plant management, home improvement, etc - you'll find the same thing. Search results dominated by sites that have mastered the art of producing SEO-optimised "content" that is not authoritative, full of waffle, and not especially helpful. For whatever reason, the bus…

I have noticed this on YouTube as well, I would assume something similar is happening on other video sites. Sometimes there is a video on a trending topic among the first few Google search results, and when you go over to YouTube and have a look it turns out to be a montage of stock and/or stolen photos, with a synthesized voice reading a narration that was obviously churned out by a content mill somewhere very low-w…

I've started using YaCy and Searxng for searches. It was terrible at first but I set my YaCy engine off indexing high quality sites that I find useful for the subjects I'm interested in.

It's refreshing in some ways - the content I get is definitely "outside of my promoted echo chamber". However, you really need to use use query syntax to get decent results, something I'd gotten out of the habit of doing with Google (actually, I'm convinced Google ignored it half the time even if you tried).

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

#183

Post by joegahona »

> And every SEO expert knows that long articles rank higher than short ones, so now "treating covid headache" takes you to a thousand-word article when really I just want short summaries of the top three treatments.

John Mueller from Google has been saying the opposite for years: https://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comments/clg1hn/how_to_find_...

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

#184

Post by standardUser »

kurupt213 wrote: post #133

If I need information I look for the publications linked from the NIH website. I think the problems with health information are that the vast majority of the population isn’t sophisticated enough to understand the physiological and biochemical specifics, and that generic info is pretty much worthless. People should listen to their doctors (who specifically advise against running to google for every symptom)

Doctors can be wrong (they have been for me multiple times) and I feel a certain sense of responsibility for learning about and understanding what is going on in my body. Now, if I had a panel of doctors at the ready to answer my questions and explain things to me in the detail I want, that would be great. But that seems unrealistic. So we do need something to bridge the gap between the fallible doctor we very occasionally get to talk to and our otherwise deep ignorance of our own health and bodies.

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

#185

Post by mbostleman »

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…

>>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 don't know that the cause of this particular misalignment is "private sector". But no doubt the current implementations by the private sector exhibit this misalignment.

>>I'd say the UK NHS website and symptoms/medications pages hit the nail on the head>>

I assume this implies that the NHS website does not exhibit the previously noted misalignment. Why is that? Obviously this site's sole funding is not from advertising. I assume it's from taxes collected by the government. So what is incentivizing those that build this site and maintain its content to make it so good?

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

#186

Post by myself248 »

tern wrote: post #177
stevage wrote: post #17

The phenomenon they describe for health information is, IMHO, absolutely rife across many different domains. Try looking up information about gardening, plant management, home improvement, etc - you'll find the same thing. Search results dominated by sites that have mastered the art of producing SEO-optimised "content" that is not authoritative, full of waffle, and not especially helpful. For whatever reason, the bus…

A partial salve would be a search engine that only returns results from websites where the people writing cannot make money from their content. It's quite interesting to ponder the implications of this.

When you put it that way, it's so glaringly obvious that Doubleclick (wearing their Google skin; keeping the name when they merged was the smartest thing the devil ever did) is the precise and irreconcilable opposite.

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

#187

Post by nicoburns »

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.

The NHS definitely does rank highly in the UK. Not sure if it ranks above web md, but they’re usually both in the top 5 results if they have a relevant page.

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

#188

Post by zeruch »

ajmurmann wrote: post #92
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.

That's where I continue to want to see what results in a search engine would look like that heavily punishes presence of advertisements in a result. All the SEO spam pages are ad-driven, so cutting out anything following that incentive should result in removal of all pages that follow that terrible SEO spam pattern that ruins search results.

"that heavily punishes presence of advertisements in a result." while that is pleasing to read at face value, it has two fundamental problems:

1. it's orthogonal to relevance of content (semi-solvable algorithmically I suspect) 2. it's antithetical to Google's core business model (a lot tougher nut to crack)

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

#190

Post by nicoburns »

lupire wrote: post #160
petepete wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sites that sit on gov.uk are usually either: * transactional services - those that let a person do a task, like applying for a driving licence or registering a trademark * information services - a collection of guidance on a subject, like maximum working hours or data protection responsibilities There are some that don't really fall into either category and are there to advertise something. They aim to be informa…

Why don't you use SEO on your non-campaign transactional and info sites? Those are the ones that need protection from fee scammers. It seems you've got it exactly backwards.

SEO is what the scammers use. When Google prioritises an authoritative page, that’s making SEO less important.
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