Paper Info
Title
MedSearch: a specialized search engine for medical information retrieval
Abstract
People are thirsty for medical information. Existing Web search engines often cannot handle medical search well because they do not consider its special requirements. Often a medical information searcher is uncertain about his exact questions and unfamiliar with medical terminology. Therefore, he sometimes prefers to pose long queries, describing his symptoms and situation in plain English, and receive comprehensive, relevant information from search results. This paper presents MedSearch, a specialized medical Web search engine, to address these challenges. MedSearch uses several key techniques to improve its usability and the quality of search results. First, it accepts queries of extended length and reforms long queries into shorter queries by extracting a subset of important and representative words. This not only significantly increases the query processing speed but also improves the quality of search results. Second, it provides diversified search results. Lastly, it suggests related medical phrases to help the user quickly digest search results and refine the query. We evaluated MedSearch using medical questions posted on medical discussion forums. The results show that MedSearch can handle various medical queries effectively and efficiently.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1145/1458082.1458104
CIKM
Keywords
Field
DocType
specialized search engine,medical question,medical phrase,medical discussion forum,medical search,specialized medical web search,various medical query,medical information retrieval,medical information searcher,medical terminology,medical information,search result,web search engine,search engine,information retrieval
Data mining,Web search query,World Wide Web,Metasearch engine,Semantic search,Phrase search,Information retrieval,Computer science,Web query classification,Queries per second,Search-oriented architecture,Search analytics
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
39
1.52
34
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Gang Luo174144.73
Chunqiang Tang2128775.09
Hao Yang366048.26
Xing Wei4114160.87