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What would a “good” WebMD look like?

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

#191

Post by Spooky23 »

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'…

I disagree with the WebMD hate. It’s not the best site out there, but it isn’t delivering misinformation or otherwise problematic data.

That type of site is difficult in general. People seeking medical advice via online means are always going to struggle.

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

#192

Post by joegahona »

lupire wrote: post #163

I don't get the WebMD hate. It's leagues ahead of Healthline. WebMD is full of doctors. The gov and AMA should be sanctioning doctors for abuse of license if the content is bad.

The atrocious UX isn't helping. Paginated articles, popups, autoplay ads within the well of content... these tactics put you in a bad neighborhood with bot-farm-type sites, no matter how many doctors are involved in the actual content creation.

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

#193

Post by Calavar »

lupire wrote: post #150
ajmurmann wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anyone who wants attention is motivated to do SEO. Should engines downrank every site that has good SEO? That is, downrank every site that ranks highly? They already look at things like clickthroughand dwell time and bounce back. If enough people dislike Example.com enough to avoid clicking on it or come back to search after visiting it, the engine learns that it is a bad result. Maybe the problem is that most people…

No, they key is to differentiate SEO'd pages with useful content from SEO'd pages with useless content.

This is a game as old as search engines. In 2005, it meant filtering out sites that were just lists of keywords, not coherent sentences and paragraphs. It meant for giving extra points to articles with structure, such as header tags and paragraphs, as opposed to just blobs of text. It meant using PageRank to organically discover which pages real people thought were useful.

It's a much subtler and more difficult problem in 2022, but there are also better tools to do it (big NLG models). It just seems that Google lost interest in quality control at some point.

And I would guess they lost interest in quality control because of Chrome's market penetration. Chrome is a browser monopoly at this point, and with Google being the default search engine on Chrome, they no longer have to give quality results to maintain their search user base. On top of that, they control such a large share of the ad market that any SEO spam website is more likely than not to be using AdSense. Which means they have a financial incentive to deliver page views to SEO spam sites, which tend to have higher ad/content ratios.

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

#194

Post by myself248 »

captainbland wrote: post #140
boringg wrote: post #23

WebMD is for the general public (GP) and useless on anything you need in depth - helpful for broad inquiry. UpToDate which practitioners use is amazing but too much information for the general public. It's part of what I mentioned in another comment which is that the internet is to general and vague in its information (and generally low-mid quality) while private information is, sometimes, of higher quality. It leads…

GP is quite a confusing initialism to use here as GP often means "general practitioner", which is like a family doctor/primary care physician in much of the anglosphere outside of the US.

Ugh, and "family doctor" drives me nuts, I'm not a family, there's just one of me, I just want a general practitioner.

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

#195

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

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…

Just another aspect of neoliberalism. An undue faith in markets.

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

#196

Post by thenerdhead »

WebMD and hypotheticals like this blog reminds me of a quote from Hamlet:

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”

I do not think you can make a good nor bad version of WebMD. But what it does today is makes you think about things that you're better off not thinking about.

Health is subjective to start with. It is more qualitative than it is quantitative at the individual level. The exact problem of WebMD is that it uses the latter to help inform the former.

I have got way more answers from old books than I can find online. Especially those on back pain, chronic illness, and even regular headaches. Much of this information is not new and even goes back to the idea that "thinking makes it so".

The real question in my head is whether WebMD does more harm than it does good or vice versa. It's pointless to think about because it is what it is.

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

#197

Post by droopyEyelids »

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.

This is so simple its easy to overlook the fact that its also ingenious

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

#198

Post by [deleted] »

lupire wrote: post #167
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'…

Google's problem is that it ranks pages, not sites. It will much prefer a crappy site with a crappy page that is highly specific to your search query, instead of showing you a good site related to the idea you are looking for. It puts far too much faith in its language parser , which doesn't comprehend .

[deleted]

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

#199

Post by awinter-py »

'seo' appears only twice in this but deserves way more blame imo

The life cycle of an article now seems to be 1) legit author in legit place, possibly paywalled, 2) worse copies elsewhere, with or without sources

(I can't say how prevalent this pattern is, but you've seen it too, and if google has any nlp chops at all they are able to measure it in their index)

even bad content doesn't come out of nowhere. an indexing platform that tried to tease out the 'copy of a copy' structure of the web would have a much easier time filtering out the blurry copies.

not saying this is google's job, but they are the architects of the incentive structure here, and are in the best position to fix it if they wanted to

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