The improved health site will feature advanced search technology and content to help users find the information they need to manage their health and wellness.

"Healthline now provides a growing suite of advanced health information technologies to more than 40 top-tier companies, across almost every sector in consumer healthcare," said West Shell III, Chairman & CEO of Healthline Networks.

ABCNEWS.com/Health will combine ABC News’ library of health resources with Healthline’s interactive applications such as "SymptomSearch," "Treatment Search," and "DocSearch." ABC users will also have access to health and wellness trends via Healthline’s health content and its partners.

"We’re pleased to add Healthline’s content and tools to ABC News’ online library of health and medical reporting – which features reporting from all ABC News shows and platforms, including ‘Good Morning America’ and ‘World News,’" said Paul Slavin, Senior Vice President of ABC News Digital.

"ABC News Digital is dedicated to providing our users with health and wellness resources."
 

Healthcare online ad spending could rise to $2.2 billion by 2011, according to eMarketer. That potential has plenty of companies interested in capturing the eyeballs and the revenue of the persistent demand for health information.

Healthline made the newest bid for the competitive marketplace, where major tech players like Microsoft and Google, and a host of startups all reach for the brass ring of healthcare ad revenue. The launch of HealthSTAT, or Healthline Semantic Taxonomy Ad Targeting, arrives with the promise of being able to better match concepts, not just keywords, when people search on a HealthSTAT-powered site.

Several major online destinations already serve Healthline’s ads: United Health, AARP, and Merriam-Webster among them. Healthline said a content page describing a given set of symptoms, for example, would generate ads matching suggested treatments for the root causes.

On the medical side, Healthline promised its ad network can work operate with the distinct requirements of given pharmaceutical campaigns. They cited the example of an anti-psychotic drug that should only be placed alongside content related to bipolar conditions, as opposed to general treatment of depression.

Such depth of information should prove useful to the many people who seek out data on medical conditions each day. If executed well, an accurate ad campaign could put people on track, with their physician’s valuable input, into finding the right solutions for their needs. That’s not a bad outcome for an ad.

The real accomplishment health-oriented websites might make will be with the friends they keep. Though this may be to the dismay of Microsoft, which runs HealthVault, and Google, which has a pilot project with the Cleveland Clinic, the old adage of who you know will matter more to people looking for an option to manage their healthcare information online.

Healthline scored a big win in finding a friend in major health insurer Aetna, and that company

Ask Makes Smart Answers Healthier

With technology companies ranging from the titans of the Internet to the stealthiest web startups locking on to health-related information, we think signs point to 2008 being a big year for healthcare and the online world.

Ask’s director of online information resources, Gary Price, let us know about the new Health Smart Answers appearing on Ask.com now, as the company takes a step toward the melding of health information with search resources. Here’s a sample query on hip replacement, a common procedure these days for many people.

A study Ask commissioned with Harris Interactive found that people rely on the Internet nearly as much as they do their primary doctors when it comes to healthcare information. It’s an area where Ask wants to be in front those searchers with information at their fingertips (as Gary likes to refer to Smart Answers.)

Partnerships with Healthline and ex-AOL CEO Steve Case’s Revolution Health provide content – including medical definitions, images, links to reference materials and other data – for Health Smart Answers on Ask.

Yep, that’s right, the same guys who give us a great Thursday night lineup (“My Name Is Earl,” “The Office,” “Scrubs,” and “30 Rock,” though I think they swapped the order), just gave Healthline, a medical search engine, a great wad of cash.  Other contributors include Aetna Ventures, LLC, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, and U.S. News and World Report.

There’s the financial side for you.  As for the operational aspects, VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall reports that Healthline “is focusing solely on health search, and is making surprising headway.  It has six million monthly unique users, and is the only search engine among the top-twenty U.S. health-related sites – with the exception of Yahoo Health.”

And to connect the financial and operational facets, we’ll go to an official press release from Healthline itself.  “Highlighting this financing round is a series of key operating alliances between Healthline and its strategic investors, including an agreement in which Healthline will provide its industry-leading search, navigation and content services to NBC Universal’s iVillage Total Health, a consumer health portal.”

Sounds like everybody’s coming out ahead.  I am worried about “Scrubs,” though – seems like the show came kinda close to being cancelled.  Perhaps Healthline could send some of the $21 million its way.

"As a publisher committed to providing consumers access to credible, trustworthy health information, U.S. News & World Report’s web site features an array of health resources such as a comprehensive — and growing — Diseases and Conditions Center, customizable rankings of hospitals and health plans, and the latest health news and analysis," said Bill Holiber, president, U.S. News & World Report.

 "By adding Healthline’s health information services toUSNews.com, we’re expanding the breadth of health content available to our readers, improving the overall consumer experience and reinforcing USNews.com’s reputation as the place Americans turn to when faced with major life decisions regarding their health."

When visitors to USNews.com search the site Healthline analyzes the text for health related terms. If it is a health related term the Healthline HealthFind service searches its database of more than 1 million medical terms and provides users with results from the U.S. News library of health news and Healthline’s Medically Guided Search resources.

Other features from Healthline include a visual search using HealthMaps, which allows users to click on topics related to specific diseases and conditions instead of having to type queries into the search box. Users can also broaden or narrow their search by using navigation links.

"Healthline and U.S. News & World Report share a singular vision: to provide consumers with authoritative, pertinent information that will guide them in this era of consumer-directed healthcare," said West Shell III, chairman and chief executive officer, Healthline Networks.

How do you gauge the validity of health information in search results? How do you find out what the standard of care is for your particular ailment? In a recent blog post, Google VP Adam Bosworth attempts to tackle these questions and more concerning health-related search – a vertical that finds itself in great demand from searchers these days.

Google already has methods for labeling reliable health-related links within its search results, but as Bosworth writes, the process isn’t really doing all that much to help searchers:

Unfortunately, many of you either don’t notice these words when you’re searching about health questions at Google or have no idea what they mean. Clearly, we can do better at making this kind of labeling noticeable and your ideas on how we could make it clear to you that a site is medically reliable or trustworthy would be greatly appreciated as we think this through.

As the need for relevant and specific health-related search results continues to rise, vertically based engines/portals like Healthline are springing up in an attempt to provider users with accurate and up-to-date information.

Google touts itself as the ultimate repository for all of the Internet’s information. As search has evolved, however, users are less concerned with the quantity of information at their disposal than retrieving as much relevant information about a singular topic or niche as possible, which is the reason that the inception of vertical search engines has become prevalent as of late.

As Bosworth notes here, Google is starting to recognize that it’s the delivery and presentation of information that matters most: 

At the end of the day, all these questions are about how you find the information you need. They are deceptively simple. If they were about restaurants, they would be trivial. But they are actually matters of life and death in the extreme and quality of life in the common case. In short, they matter profoundly.

This overture from Google leaves more questions and little answers, but at least invites community participation in the conversation.

Direct links to Live Search appear for each definition in Merriam-Webster. The ResourceShelf website noted the new linking.

This effort places Live Search in a logical place for people to find. It’s reasonable to think someone hitting Merriam-Webster for information is engaged in some research. Enabling a link from a definition to more information at Live makes sense.

Other links on Merriam-Webster point to content at a couple of other authoritative resources. Many definitions also point to partial content appearing on Encyclopedia Brittanica, while health-related ones have links to HealthLine resources.

Microsoft has made efforts over the years to be more of a presence in fields where people in education would encounter their products. Once upon a time, Apple owned the education market, but that has changed thanks to heavy competition and a growing need for students to bring computers to school, particularly in college environments.

The Encarta encyclopedia has been a Microsoft staple for many years. Instead of visiting a bookshelf full of heavy paper copies and paging through them, people can search faster for topic content.

There’s also the need to promote the brand as back-to-school sales become much more prominent for many people. The demand is not as great as during the end of year holiday periods, but a lot of people want to purchase a new machine in August for their offspring.

Microsoft fell behind with its Vista consumer launch. They will have to make up some ground for lost holiday sales that affected their OEM partners as much as themselves.

Having tie-ins to valuable, educational properties like Merriam-Webster could be a selling point beyond the desktop/notebook/tablet PC. Since so many people carry powerful cellphones, and Merriam-Webster offers software for the Windows Mobile OS, maybe this Live Search tie-in hints at a future mobile focus on the mobile-using youth market.

In all, says the company, 3,500 symptoms and 900 diseases are documented. Healthline says that’s ten times the number of symptoms covered by WebMD or MayoClinic.

It seems simple enough. A person types in a symptom or collection of symptoms and the engine brings back all matching diagnoses. My main symptom brought back three pages of results. It’s probably the first one. Visitors can also keep a personalized list of symptoms to help narrow down the results.

“As a physician and heavy Internet user, I know that my patients are increasingly using the Web to research symptoms – it’s a great way, in the privacy of your own home, to explore topics you think you may want to talk to your doctor about,” said Enoch Choi, M.D., a family practice physician based in Palo Alto, Calif.

Healthline, a company that prides itself on its walled garden approach to health research by including only doctor-reviewed articles instead of the entirety of Web sources. The company says its new Symptom Search is set apart from other research tools because it uses a search-driven approach rather than static "interview formats," which, according to their numbers, only retrieve one-tenth of the number of symptoms and one-fifth of the number of possible causes.

Similar to Google’s Suggest feature, Symptom Search has a type-ahead feature that suggests ways to narrow it down. For example, if a person types in "cough," types of coughs like "painful cough" or "hacking cough" will be presented.

“Symptom Search offers a much more interactive, useful way for individuals to research health concerns, helping prepare them for conversations with their physicians,” said Paul Auerbach, M.D., clinical professor of Emergency Medicine at Stanford University and chair of Healthline’s Medical Advisory Board.

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The tale of Dr. Todd Mitchell and his search for an antidote for six people who had ingested death cap mushrooms led him to Google Scholar. He spent several hours searching until finding the result his patients needed: milk thistle.

Five of the six patients survived thanks to the treatment, but the sixth died after the toxins in her liver spread to her kidneys. The survivors all faced the prospect of emergency liver transplants or dying until Mitchell found the cure.

Had he been aware of other search engines like Kosmix, that search would have taken far less time. I heard from Kosmix today, after their staff had seen my earlier story.

They invited me to visit the site, and search for death cap mushroom under the Health tab. The top result led to a Topic Page for death cap mushrooms, and located there under Drugs was a listing for silibinin, derived from milk thistle, which Mitchell was able to obtain for his patients.

Total time to find this on Kosmix: roughly five seconds.

I decided to try the same query on Healthline to see if that health-focused vertical search would deliver a similar result for death cap mushroom. Its top result was a doctor-reviewed article from the Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine about milk thistle; the link pointed directly to the death cap mushroom section of the two-page article.

Healthline did not provided an immediate reference to silibinin as Kosmix did, so Mitchell would have had to do a little more digging to find that. It probably would not have taken a knowledgeable physician like him very long to make that connection.

Vertical search has been growing in importance, but it hasn’t broken through to the mainstream like Google has. Hopefully more medical professionals will learn of and utilize options like Kosmix and Healthline to help round out the information they possess when faced with a difficult diagnosis.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.