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What would a “good” WebMD look like?

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

#121

Post by ahstilde »

Disclaimer, I am the founder of Wyndly (YCW21) -- we fix allergies for life through telehealth and personalized immunotherapy.

WebMD, Healthline, and Verywell Health all monetize off of views. They're exceptional SEO operators, and they know how to game Google. The trick is to find people who aren't monetizing off of just views.

Actually helpful information is coming from services that don't monetize off of views, or where the content is written for more than just SEO. For example, Anja Health is educating people about a novel idea (https://www.tiktok.com/@kathrynanja). At Wyndly, we build trust with our content by having my co-founder answer common questions (https://www.instagram.com/wyndlyhealth/).

These are experts sharing their niche. In fact, we source the questions we answer from our support inbox. So, not only are we putting useful information our into the world, we're creating resources for our support team. It's a win-win.

Side note: yes, we do play the SEO game somewhat. At the end of the day, if we have a successful video, it'd be foolish not to resource it for Google and for people: https://www.wyndly.com/blogs/learn/what-kind-of-doctor-for-a...

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

#123

Post by nonameiguess »

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 think this is giving way too much credit to Google. WebMD has existed in some form since 1996 and first went live as WebMD in 1999. They've been the web's most popular health information publisher from the beginning. This was before Google became the web's dominant search engine.

If Google has an issue here, it's that it tries to rank things based on a more or less mathematical look at its actual popularity at the time of indexing. It isn't aiming to promote sites based on quality in order to make them popular. If a site is where other sites are pointing and people are visiting, then Google is going to rank them highly (modulo whatever the hell other secret sauce goes into the algorithm - i.e. punishing slow load times), even if the information content is bad. WebMD was very much already the web's most popular source of health information well before they hit the top of any Google search.

This isn't even a problem specific to the web, let alone Google. Medical textbooks were available at the time Chicken Soup for the Soul was a best seller. Consumers quite often prefer shittier information to better.

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

#124

Post by n4r9 »

harvey9 wrote: post #111
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 wonder if UK users see the NHS site further up the rankings? I'd be curious to know if people are putting in 'NHS' as a search term as well.

Yes, I'm in the UK and will often include "NHS" in the search terms when reading up on health issues or advice.

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

#125

Post by nvrspyx »

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…

Maybe instead of heavily punishing websites with ads, a search engine could instead punish heavily ad-driven websites. A lot of the SEO-exploiting blog mills are filled to the brim with ads where the goal is to get you to visit to view as many ads as possible, not provide good content that's funded by ads.

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

#126

Post by noneeeed »

harvey9 wrote: post #111
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 wonder if UK users see the NHS site further up the rankings? I'd be curious to know if people are putting in 'NHS' as a search term as well.

I consistently see NHS results at or near the top for most symptom searches.

I don't know if that's geography specific.

I just tried it for "swollen ankles" and the NHS came top, followed by webmd.

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

#127

Post by xivzgrev »

I don't have to imagine - Healthline.

it's clearly an SEO game that's cropped up recently, but it's executed in a sustainable way. The articles I stumble on are actually helpful.

For example, there was a recent HN article on research supporting the practice of grounding. So I googled it, and found a Healthline article: https://www.healthline.com/health/grounding#benefits

It clearly explained what it was, why it may have benefits, what a few experts say, risks, etc.

There are ads but barely (for now) - on a recent article on mobile, it's one small banner, and then one in-line ad that doesn't even look like one. It's not a barely-readable dumpster fire like WedMD.

Of course, all roads lead to Rome, so at some point Healthline may look like a dumpster fire as well, so enjoy it while we can!

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

#128

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

thomasfedb wrote: post #55
kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #4

Sure this article is spammy self-promotion, but their prototype is exciting. I’d use it. It’s frustrating to go to a drugstore and see medicines for a cough, let’s say, each with a different active ingredient, and be unable to find concrete information comparing the effectiveness of each ingredient. And wow, the WebMD article they mentioned on essential oils was terrible. It really lowers my opinion of WebMD. At this…

Isn't that what the pharmacist is for? Pharmacies sell some dumb stuff, but if you actually ask for advice from the person with a license they'd like to keep, you should get some straight talk I'd think.

As an experiment, I will try that next time I’m buying an OTC remedy. It sounds like we share an opinion: Given that drugstores unironically place homeopathic nostrums and essential oils right next to actual medicines, I treat them as hostile environments out to scam unwary consumers rather than honest sources of information. But, as I said, I will give that a fair test.

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

#129

Post by mtts »

This problem is pretty solved in the Netherlands. https://www.thuisarts.nl is set up by the Dutch federation of General Practitioners and provides good, non-sensationalist information that is guaranteed to be vetted by the likes of the very doctor you'd normally visit (or by the people who train them, I presume - pretty sure if you look up a GP handbook you'll find almost the same text as on that site, only with more detail and with more complicated language).

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

#130

Post by hundchenkatze »

edmundsauto wrote: post #98
_fat_santa wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue isn't data, its the "packaging". Going through the NHS website, it's useful if you already know what you have. I'll use myself as an example because I had an ingrown hair on my neck a few weeks back, went on google and I didn't search for "Ingrown Hair" because at that stage, I didn't know that it was an ingrown hair. I searched for "bumps on your neck" which led me to conclude that it was an ingrow…

This is the model for weather in the US. Do you like weather.com and all the derivatives?

weather.com is a private company owned by IBM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weather_Company

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