201–210 of 323 posts
The primary audience is physicians / clinicians, and they make money by selling subscriptions. So not a consumer health product, but an example of what the gold standard in this space looks like.
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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.
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.
I think it's generally possible to tell, based on what's provided on WebMD, what symptoms would cause a doctor to recommend an immediate trip to the ER or surgery or pharmaceuticals. It's required learning more than I would otherwise know about how my organs function, but I also don't think I know like... an exceptional amount about the human body.
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…
The same is happening with many doctors that need to pay their overhead, many offices turn into "pill mills" because that is what keeps the lights on. We're at a very weird time in history, where people are more profitable as unhealthy individuals, so certain actors in health care peddle fear, confusion, and paranoia to sell medications as well as the valid issues and panaceas to them, and even minor and completely minute afflictions normally have commercials running non-stop on TV. WebMD is a tiny blip when you consider that people type their affliction into Google first.
Perhaps for them, and as the online ad economy melts itself down, contracting with the government to provide official information on a non-ad funded site with a far less cluttered UI might be a better long-term profit model.
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…
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…
It's a common conflict for info publishers, the only solution is really to get rid of advertising. WebMD relies too much on industry advertisers and on companies selling pharmaceuticals and it corrupts their ability to objectively provide health advice. Advertisers pressure publishers for prime placement, and for editorial influence when they have weight to them, and it corrupts the tone of what a site can publish by…
The thing is that to wider economy and society at large, people are vastly more profitable if they are healthy. This is one of the top reasons why countries spend so much on healthcare: healthy citizens are productive citizens.
The entire problem is one of externalized costs and misaligned incentives.
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> 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.
> And the users doing the curated need to be vetted. It comes back to the age-old question: Who vets the vetters?
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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'…
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.
If worst comes to worst, just add "reddit" to your search term, and then all you have to do is determine whether he answers you find look like they came from a human, a spammer, or a corporation.