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What would a “good” WebMD look like?

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

#261

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

mikkergp wrote: post #256
kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually do dance around a claim regarding cancer: > Many essential oils have antioxidant properties. Antioxidants help prevent damage to cells caused by free radicals. This damage can lead to serious diseases such as cancer. For comparison, Wikipedia: > Aromatherapy may be useful to induce relaxation, but there is not sufficient evidence that essential oils can effectively treat any condition.

Is the wikipedia article actually more accurate though? https://www.healthline.com/health/tea-tree-oil-for-nail-fung... "Results of a 1994 studyTrusted Source found pure tea tree oil was equally as effective as the antifungal clotrimazole (Desenex) in treating fungal toenail infections. Clotrimazole is available both over the counter (OTC) and by prescription." Reading through the wikipedia article it seems they're c…

Honestly I'm WAY out of my lane here. I have no medical training and can't even call myself an interested amateur. So me trying to argue via random snippets of internet text would just waste everyone's time! :-)

The only thing I can really say is, there's a lot of medical-related material out there that seems vague and hopeful, that I don't think is doing much good for anyone but its creators. I'm with you - let's see what the research says and what the studies show, while keeping the placebo effect in mind. If crabgrass cures cancer, I'm down for some grazing.

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

#262

Post by ajmurmann »

zeruch wrote: post #188
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.

"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)

> 1. it's orthogonal to relevance of content

The entire point of my comment was that it's not orthogonal. The ads are what fuels the click bait and SEO-driven articles. Nobody for example would ever pay a subscription to a website that is just waffle filler. While stackoerflow has ads, it's much better in that regard to the SEO spam pages.

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

#263

Post by ajmurmann »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #113
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.

Punishment/vengeance is a popular idea around here, but you have to also remember that a search engine is supposed to bring you the most relevant results. Filtering out, say, Stack Overflow or Reddit because it has ads doesn't help you when it answers your question and is perhaps the only thing on the internet that truly does. People seem to think there's this ad-less replica of the internet, sitting right behind our…

When I said "punish", I meant that the ranking algorithm should do that. It's not about vengeance, it's about filtering out SEO spam. The problem with filtering out SEO spam by detecting it as such is that it's by definition an arms race. That's why I propose to instead of looking for the symptom (SEO spam) pull it out at the wrong incentive structure that's causing it (ads).

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

#264

Post by ajmurmann »

beambot wrote: post #245
fredophile wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's orthogonal to relevance of content I disagree. The way content is presented matters. Splitting an article into 4-6 pages and filling those pages with ads makes me not want to read that content. I'd much rather go somewhere that has the same text in a single page and only a few ads.

What about playing 2-3 unskippable video ads before watching the actual content? Thus, Google should degrade YouTube search results as well!

The ideal search engine would show me the ad-free page first given otherwise identical quality. Of course Google will never do anything like that. That's why I'm hoping for an alternative search engine to do so.

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

#265

Post by quickthrower2 »

nickff wrote: post #243
googlryas wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fairly straightforward answer is that the government's goals are not necessarily aligned with your own. You, presumably, care very much about your own personal health. You also care about other people's health, but you really, really care about your own health, and probably don't want to die earlier than you need to. The government, on the other hand, doesn't generally care about individuals, and is working on a st…

The terse version of this is to say that the government would prefer you die cheaply rather than live at great expense.

The government is pulling the lever on the train track thats saves 5 but kills another 1.

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

#266

Post by shuntress »

googlryas wrote: post #238
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…

A fairly straightforward answer is that the government's goals are not necessarily aligned with your own. You, presumably, care very much about your own personal health. You also care about other people's health, but you really, really care about your own health, and probably don't want to die earlier than you need to. The government, on the other hand, doesn't generally care about individuals, and is working on a st…

You are talking about "The Government" as if it is some uncontrollable force of nature. Here in reality, we are actually self-governing.

Obviously it's messy, complicated, and not as simple as just "deciding what to do and doing it".

But it is fair to say that pretty much every rational person agrees that we should take care of each other including anyone with a rare condition.

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

#267

Post by ajmurmann »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #233
Calavar wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 organi…

This seems like a good fit for a ! solution like duckduckgo. !gov !universities These may already exist.

That stuff definitely helps. That's also why do many now just search Reddit. However, wouldn't it be nice if the search engine could be smart enough to figure that out itself?

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

#268

Post by andrewljohnson »

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…

In the US, the CDC has been really bad at providing health information, and the FDA has been really bad at providing food safety info. They also don’t have incentive alignment (incentives are mostly to grow the bureaucracy and serve careers).

I’d expect private enterprise to eventually converge on better info… eventually consumers will choose services that provide the best info amidst competition.

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

#269

Post by adolph »

rootusrootus wrote: post #89
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.

> 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.

There is the "awesome list" phenomena:

Search "medical information awesome list"

https://github.com/NeovaHealth/awesome-health

https://github.com/lalaithan/awesome-health

https://github.com/jeromecc/awesome-health

Fork and make your own!

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

#270

Post by Aengeuad »

briandear wrote: post #118
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…

If the “government” becomes the only source of truth, that source of truth is necessarily political. The oft-mentioned NHS — do they not have an incentive to lower health care expenditures? Would providing medical information to the public that prescribes a suggested course of action incentivize the course of action that is least expensive to the government but not necessarily the best treatment? Is there any potenti…

Of course the NHS has an incentive to lower costs, it's in their interest for doctors to prescribe the most cost effective treatment as patients rarely stop coming back as a result of ineffective treatment. Does this mean that objectively good preventative treatment (like physio) and quality of life elective surgery get pushed to the back of the triage queue, and that individual needs are occasionally failed? Absolutely, and in these cases where the NHS falls short there's always the option of going private, which just highlights that healthcare is always political.

In a purely private healthcare system (which doesn't exist in the developed world) the politics are firstly whether you can pay and secondly how much you can pay. No point offering free dieting and lifestyle advice when risky weight loss surgery (which has a notoriously low success rate) offers instant success, got a bad back or knee? Try out this risk free* (*not actually risk free) surgery! It wasn't that long ago in the US that getting cancer without health insurance was a death sentence, and that again is a political choice, one that the US government reneged on.

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