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What would a “good” WebMD look like?

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

#161

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

unethical_ban wrote: post #29
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…

Tragedy of the Commons. We all could use easily accessible, accurate and unbiased medical information, but most people can't or won't pay a website to procure and publish such content, especially when they don't really know if they can trust the site! It's rather circular. If only there were some association of all people, some kind of organization that included all members of the public, which could collect a nomina…

We all know the people that collect the nominal fee have the best interest in delivering a quality product - a serious responsibility to do so even - and not solely making their section of the entity larger and more powerful year over year.

What is a bureaucrat if not a highly skilled creator who completes their mission ahead of time and under-budget?

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

#162

Post by aaaddaaaaa1112 »

aantix wrote: post #148

Five year survival rates listed for local surgeons across the procedures they perform. Sortable by number of procedures performed, death rates on the table, survival rates. I don't care how "kind" the physician is, if they listened to my concerns. I want to know their effectiveness.

No post body was provided.

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

chasd00 wrote: post #132

the best site would be a single page that says "talk to your doctor" vertically and horizontally aligned in a large font. If you want to read about how not using a certain brand of band-aids means your child is destined to become a serial killer then research medical information online. For medical information the Internet is the last place i go.

[deleted]

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

#165

Post by lupire »

dbcurtis wrote: post #115
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.

Imagine a world where the biggest search engine made its money from advertising. In that kind of a world, wouldn’t the search engine primarily be incentivized to show you the results pages with the most advertising, regardless of the quality of the content?

No, because people would stop using the crappy search engine.

That's how the world was before Google.

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

#167

Post by lupire »

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'…

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.

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

#168

Post by lupire »

Angostura wrote: post #84
switch007 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

The point is that they aren't neutral. They have a bias toward what they think is best, and they don't overcome it by acknowledging and advertising alternative views.

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

#169

Post by tetromino_ »

ajmurmann wrote: post #33
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 believe you don't have this problem with stackoverflow because it's user generated content. Answers provided by people doing it out of passion are usually better. That's why you'll often find the best answers on Reddit. As to why there is no successful medical overflow.com: Software developers are inherently more web-affine and likely to help there. On top of that it's a great way for developers to show their knowl…

The difference is that software developers have a freedom of speech online. There is no legal liability or professional consequences for a junior coder accidentally giving out wrong-headed or misleading programming advice. So coders post freely, and the good posts eventually float to the top.

In licensed and regulated fields - law, medicine, finance - the situation is quite different. Posting a bad answer might result in you getting sued by an angry reader or investigated by your field's regulatory body.

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

#170

Post by unethical_ban »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #161
unethical_ban wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tragedy of the Commons. We all could use easily accessible, accurate and unbiased medical information, but most people can't or won't pay a website to procure and publish such content, especially when they don't really know if they can trust the site! It's rather circular. If only there were some association of all people, some kind of organization that included all members of the public, which could collect a nomina…

We all know the people that collect the nominal fee have the best interest in delivering a quality product - a serious responsibility to do so even - and not solely making their section of the entity larger and more powerful year over year. What is a bureaucrat if not a highly skilled creator who completes their mission ahead of time and under-budget?

This, but unironically. A number of countries (and a number of federal and state orgs in the US) have competent sources of record for the public good. Why we don't have it for medicine is beyond me.
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