OrganizedWisdom Health Blog

Getting Vertical Search Right: The Future of Search is Service

Just about to head over to SES right now.  Steven Krein is speaking on the main stage this afternoon about Getting Vertical Search Right.

We'll be presenting on our strong belief that the future of search is SERVICE.

At OrganizedWisdom Health we realized when we launched that when people are searching for something as important as health information, abundance is not what they are looking for.  Service is.  Most people want information, links, and resources they know they can trust.  It's no longer about getting back 1.4 million search results in .09 seconds.  People want to be guided to a few of the very best links on the topic they are searching for.  People want vetted information, curated links.  Not just a big heap of Web pages with relevant key words and lots of links in/out.

This is where the concept of service comes in.  There are great search services developing that are layering experts, and the power of human guides, onto the world's best search technologies.  Mahalo is an example of a general human-powered search service covering popular search topics from video games to entertainment news.  ChaCha is an example of a general search service where experts will help you via live chat or text.   SeamlessWeb helps people search local restaurants and place orders for delivery.  And OrganizedWisdom (what many have dubbed the Mahalo of Health) is a search service using experts and doctors to guide people to the very best health information and resources.

We believe that as a result of abundance (too many web sites, too many spammers, too many marketers, too many offers, too much information, too many options), there is going to be a powerful service infrastructure that gets built on top of search technologies.

Let me give you two key examples of services we have layered into the search experience and offer at OrganizedWisdom Health.

Last year we launched RequestWisdom - a free service where anyone can request a WisdomCard on any health topic.  If we don't already have the requested WisdomCard created, one of our expert Guides will build the WisdomCard and send the results to the person and publish for all other searchers benefit.  We do the searching for the user.  The good news is that most of the time, our team has already created a WisdomCard on the requested topic and our library of WisdomCards is growing every day (now have over 10,000 health searches covered).  But by adding a free service onto our already running human-powered search service, we are able to deliver specific, clutter-free and organized results that our community needs.

Another example of layering service into search is the new service we are testing in private beta and rolling out site wide soon.  It's called LiveWisdom, and enables anyone to chat LIVE with a doctor to ask questions for $1.99 a minute.  It's an anonymous service and easy to use.  We're adding the service of speaking with a doctor in real-time during the search experience.  We believe that connecting with a doctor should be easy, affordable, and accessible by all.  By adding this service into our search process, we make this a reality.

We'll be talking about these examples and many others today along with an incredible panel of experts.  We hope this spurs a great discussion and others begin to think of new ways to integrate service into search.

Panel Details:

Orion Panel: Getting Vertical Search Right
The need for specialized search capabilities has never been more prevalent than it is today. Established leaders and experts in vertical search application and execution will discuss the state of the industry, positive and negative experiences and best practices for answering needs of today's demanding searchers.

Moderator:

• Kevin Ryan, Vice President, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch
• Rebecca Lieb, Vice President & Editor-In-Chief, The ClickZ Network

     

Speakers:

• Bill Tancer, General Manager, Global Research, Hitwise
• Jason R. Finger, Co-Founder & Chief Executive, Seamless Web
• Paul Forster, CEO, Indeed
• Steven Krein, CEO, Organized Wisdom.com
• Joshua Stylman, Managing Partner, Reprise Media

Newsweek: UGC Pendulum Swings to Info Vetted by Experts

Tried to search blog posts recently in Technorati?  Or find the best videos on YouTube? Or how about just searching Google to answer an important health question?

It's getting more and more difficult as a result of the millions of Web pages, blogs, and videos being posted by millions of Amateurs - the so called crowd.  This is an issue we've been speaking about for more than two years now at OrganizedWisdom so you can bet we were happy to see the most recent issue of Newsweek highlighting the "expert" powered movement online.

The article titled, Revenge of the Experts: The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals, picks up on the fact that user-generated content created by amateurs has flooded the Internet.

In short, the expert is back. The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web. "People are beginning to recognize that the world is too dangerous a place for faulty information," says Charlotte Beal, a consumer strategist for the Minneapolis-based research firm Iconoculture. Beal adds that choice fatigue and fear of bad advice are creating a "perfect storm of demand for expert information."

Perhaps no area of the Web is this issue more important than with health information which is why we've been focused on using the power of experts to curate the best health information.   Not only do people want to know that the health information they read online is credible, but they don't want to have to wade through a haystack to find the best nuggets.

We're not sure that the wisdom of the crowds is even close to peaking, but we couldn't agree more with this quote from Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis that helps end the piece: "Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0—the wisdom of the crowds—and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined."

Expect to see the power of human guides, experts, and new service layers become more integrated into many of the most successful user-generated content sites.

Human-powered search engines offer a fresh experience

Scott Austin, from VentureWire, wrote a compelling commentary yesterday that does a great job of explaining the value of human powered search.

In his article, Trying to kick the Google habit, he says it's great to get 1.7 million Web pages in .017 seconds, but "it's laborious to sift through the results that aren't very organized. I rarely venture past the first ten results, and many of those listings are often stories from five years ago or links to sites that are placeholders for advertisements."

Judging from the dramatic increase we are seeing everyday in the number of health searches being conducted on OrganizedWisdom Health, there is no doubt that consumers are demanding more from their search results, especially when searching for something as critical as health information.

If you are interested in, or still unfamiliar with, the human-powered search movement, it is a worthwhile read.

What's in store for the Health 2.0 Movement in 2008...

For arguments sake, let's say 2006-ish was the year that Health 2.0 was born. At least that's when the first new companies really started to take shape in the space and promote innovation in health care in a significant way.  Besides our own OrganizedWisdom.com, companies like Sermo, DailyStrength and Revolution Health all launched new offerings.

But it was 2007 that turned Health 2.0 into a movement (a moment noticed by all who attended the Health 2.0 Conference last September in San Fransisco) and laid the foundation for what's to come over the coming years: an explosion of innovation, investment, and mass market adoption that if we have anything to do about it will bring us all new/better health care services, bring transparency to our perplexing system, and help us reduce health care costs.

So what's in store for the Health 2.0 movement in 2008?

2008 is going to be an important year for the Health 2.0 movement. 

That's because we are seeing a number of new products and services launch, get funded and strike new deals. Perhaps more importantly, several "start-ups" that have been around for a few years, will start to hit their stride, gain traction, and refine their business models.  But the biggest trend for this movement may be the integration of Health 2.0 services and ideas with the health care "establishment" -- large health care providers, networks, health plans, organizations and information providers as an example. 

Companies from the so-called old guard in health care are already starting to take notice of Health 2.0 from our own observations, but in 2008 they will much more actively get involved, and begin to learn how to integrate and innovate the ideas, thinking, and services that have been brewing these past few years.

Dozens of new online health companies were launched in the past 24 months and if you were at the Health 2.0 Conference last September, then you too felt the momentum that has been building ever since in our space.

We're feeling these trends take shape in big ways at our own OrganizedWisdom Health, but we know it is still very early.  There's a lot of work to do in 2008 (and 2009, 2010, etc.) and we look forward to helping bridge the gap between Health 2.0 and "Health Care".

 

The State of Search: 7 of 10 Americans Experience "Search Engine Fatigue"

There's some great new data to support what we've been saying for two years now: Search has become a vast wasteland of clutter, noise, spam, and information.

A new research report conduted by Kelton Research, examines "The State of Search" and describes “search engine fatigue." People are actually giving up on searching because they can't find what they are looking for.

Here are some of the key findings:

-72.3 percent of Americans experience “search engine fatigue” (either “always,” “usually,” or “sometimes”) when researching a topic on the Internet.

--65.4 percent of Americans say they’ve spent two or more hours in a single sitting searching for specific information on search engines.

--More than three out of four (75.1 percent) of those who experience search engine fatigue report getting up and physically leaving their computer without the information they were seeking – either “always,” “usually” or “sometimes.”

One of the more interesting findings that seems to confirm the need for human-guided search:

When asked to name their #1 complaint about the process, 25 percent cited a deluge of results, 24 percent cited a predominance of commercial (paid) listings, 18.8 percent blamed the search engine’s inability to understand their keywords (forcing them to try again), and 18.6 percent were most frustrated by disorganized/random results.

Here's the press release that reflects some of the data and report's primary findings.

New Pew Study Shows Patients Turn to Internet for Health Information; Now Can We Get Docs to Do The Same?

Those with chronic conditions are more likely than other e-patients to report that their online searches affected treatment decisions, their interactions with their doctors, their ability to cope with their condition, and their dieting and fitness regimen, according to Susannah Fox's just released report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project titled: E-patients With a Disability or Chronic Disease.

NPR aired an excellent story yesterday that highlights this important data and gives insight into how people (and their families) with chronic conditions are using the Internet to help with health issues.

The piece indicates that "the Internet is changing not just the way patients get medical information, but the way they interact with doctors, their families, and even with strangers."

Coming back from the 6th Annual Information Therapy Conference this week, this is clearly a significant issue.  New technologies and changing behavior for how people are getting health information means there is an opportunity to fix one of the biggest challenges facing the patient doctor relationship: patients are going to the Web for health info, and physicians are actually telling their patients NOT to go to the Web. 

One of the big health care challenges today is that many physicians do not have a trusted and unbiased online resource they can prescribe to their patients to guide them to the very best health information.  But we know that more people start online to find health information than ask their doctor.  The reality is patients are going online (and they will continue to do so) and physicians know that the current clutter online may do more harm than good so they are not sending patients to places like Google (where most people start their health searches). 

There is clearly a disconnect here which is one of the reasons why we are working hard to build the first doctor-guided search service so physicians will have a credible option to recommend patients too. From our perspective, the Web is broken for health until it is organized in a way that physicians will recommend it as a credible, helpful resource to patients, friends and family.  There are already great content sites and health portals like WebMD, RevolutionHealth and Health Central.  There are great content providers like Healthwise, A.D.A.M. and The Mayo Clinic. The problem is, people are being connected to the right information, at the right time.  And with 40-50% of the health information online now resulting from user-generated content, there is a lot more going on than evidence-based information and encyclopedia articles on health. In fact, it's one big mess of spam, clutter, UGC, and duplicative content.

The NPR story highlights the experience of Terry Wilson who was diagnosed with kidney cancer in July.  "He went straight to his computer. There was so much information out there that, at first, he felt overwhelmed.                         

"It was sort of scary at first," he says, "because there was no way to put it in perspective. There was no person I could talk to, to say: What's good information? And I didn't look that much, because my wife was afraid I was getting too upset over... what I was reading, that I would feel like I was doomed. And so she tried to keep me away from it as much as she could at first."

There are many great companies now working to solve this problem so that we can make the Web less scary for patients and physicians.  Together we can put this information in perspective, filter out the junk and guide people to great resources.

>> If you believe in the need to fix this problem the way we do and want to help out, please check out our Guide program.  We are recruiting nurses, physicians, patient experts, members from health foundations, stay at home parents, college students and anyone who cares about helping organize the world's health information to help others. 

Information Therapy Movement Taking Off

I'm in Park City, Utah participating in the 6th Annual Information Therapy Conference, hosted by the Josh Seidman and the Center for Information Therapy.  It's a great event so far and I'm looking forward to speaking about Health 2.0 trends and presenting OrganizedWisdom along with RevolutionHealth and DailyStrength on a panel hosted by Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya.

It's clear that the iX movement is evolving and is moving beyond the education phase to becoming a full-blown "movement".  Six years into the great work and education from the thought leaders attending over the years, there's no doubt the information providers, media companies, hospitals, physicians, nurses, marketers, etc. all get the value in prescribing information to patients as a solution to improving people's health, and solving some of today's biggest health challenges. 

It makes sense that just like prescribing medications to patients, one of the most essential solutions to improving patient care and people's health is to prescribe the right information, to the right patient, at the right time.

Making sure patients get quality information is perhaps the most essential solution the healthcare universe can implement when you consider that more people are now searching online for health information than seeing their doctor and that 80% of patient care today continues to be self-care.  That is, most people today continue to self-diagnose and self-treat (links to the powerpoints where I got these stats will soon be available on the iX Alliance Web site).

Attending this year are not only some of the country's largest hospitals and health providers, but also a new crop of Health 2.0 innovators as well as major media companies like the NYTimes which continues to make amazing innovations to The Gray Lady's health section under the leadership of Sarah Greene.

The energy is palpable and it is exciting to see such a great group of thinkers, entrepreneurs, leaders, health practitioners, and organizations working together to push this mission forward. There's no doubt that access to better information will help a lot of people.

Malcom Gladwell: The next revolution is not going to come from a machine.

This week a bunch of bloggers started talking about the definition of Web 3.0, debating everything from the proposed definition, to announcing that it is non-sense to even be discussing the definition.

The definition of Web 3.0 doesn't matter much at all. What does matter are the results of continued innovation.

And we believe the result of continued innovation online means a new crop of human-powered and machine supported services designed to provide better information, improved quality, more relevancy...and ultimately a whole host of new opportunities for knowledge workers. 

Thanks to Web innovation, collaboration tools, and social media we are entering the age of Social Services.  And that is a good thing for us all.

That's because people + machines are more powerful than machines on their own. People know how to see things that machines can't and vice versa.  People know how to make judgments in a different way.  People know how to organize information using common sense, while machines have all sorts of other abilities like sorting through massive amounts of information quickly to find useful patterns.

One theme that we have been preaching since the inception of OrganizedWisdom is that much of the innovation that is happening today, and that will continue to happen, is not the result of new technologies alone, but rather the new service offerings that people start providing using these new technologies.  It's the People Powered Movement. 

Mechanical Turk is a great example.  And Wikipedia is perhaps one of the beset examples of this trend...a bunch of people working together with the power of the MediaWiki platform.  Seth Godin has written about the need for People Powered before, and most recently Jason Calacanis suggested the same in his definition of Web 3.0:

"Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform."

Perhaps Malcom Gladwell summed up the thought best in a recent interview:

"Google in a sense is a symbol of the solution to an old problem. We don't need more Googles; what we need is a way to prioritize and analyze and make sense of the information we have at our fingertips. And maybe those kinds of solutions aren't technological at all. I'm quite prepared for the possibility that the next revolution is not going to come from a machine; it's going to come from creating a more thoughtful work force and giving people the opportunity to be thoughtful."

No matter the definition of Web 3.0, 3.1, 4.0 or whatever, the future of innovation is how we empower the power of people's wisdom with great technology.

eMarketer Says Pharma Failing at Web 2.0

In case you didn't see this research from eMarketer:

DESPITE ACCOUNTING FOR AN EVER-INCREASING share of online ad spending, the pharmaceutical industry is still failing to embrace the Web 2.0 strategies that could help it better engage consumers looking for health care assistance, according to eMarketer research.

The new study, "Pharmaceutical Marketing Online: Stuck in Web 1.5," projected that the pharmaceutical category--which includes hospitals, drug companies and other health care services--will account for 5% of Internet advertising by 2011, or $2.2 billion. Last year the industry was responsible for $820 million, or 4.9%, and is on track to ring in $975 million this year, or 4.5% of total Web spend.

But most of that money is still going to traditional Web 1.0 ventures that provide only limited interactions with users. "[By] restricting their brand sites to simple online information centers, pharma marketers are missing opportunities to engage consumers and boost compliance," the study said.

The study's author, eMarketer senior analyst Lisa Phillips, said Pharma's slow adoption of Web 2.0 strategies like blogs, social networks and broadband video can be attributed to its conservative approach to advertising in general and to government restrictions.

Read the full article at Online Media Daily here.

White Paper Provides Strategy to Help Drug Firms Leverage Social Media Safely

Over the past year and a half, we have met with marketing executives, compliance officers, and lawyers from more than 20 of the world's top pharmaceutical companies to discuss how they could and should be using social media to join the conversation and connect better with patients.

We felt there was (and still is) a significant opportunity for them to leverage the power of social media to share information and education to try and bridge the massive divide that currently exists between Big Pharma and the people who buy their products.

But meeting after meeting, we would be met with resistance to the effect of, "We don't do social media; We don't want to lose control; We can't use blogs..." and so on.

Being the resilient entrepreneurial types that we are, we pressed on determined to convince these companies that a healthy dose of transparency and openness would go a long way in improving relations with customers. We even developed a presentation called Pharma-Friendly Social Media to try and bridge the gap between these companies and their customers. Still, it was always an uphill battle trying to get these companies to start listening and communicating to their own customers. (If they listen, they might learn about adverse events, which is a big no-no.  Then they have to file lots of paperwork and disclose issues that may impact their drugs, etc.).

One of the biggest challenges was that the FDA has yet to issue guidance on how to conduct monitoring and marketing practices in social media so pharmaceutical companies are unsure how to proceed. And as we quickly learned, no one wants to be the guinea pig with new innovations in the pharmaceutical industry. And for good reason, Big Pharma must be cautious, conservative, and follow the letter of the law.

It is unclear when or if the FDA will issue guidance on the many new issues that have come up as a result of social media, the Internet, and online marketing. Until the waters settle, we recommend each company take baby steps and get involved. Bring your marketing teams and compliance teams together to figure out how to take the first steps.

And step one should be reading this new White Paper just co-authored by Fard Johnmar from Envision Solutions.