MedSearch: a specialized search engine for medical information retrieval

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 re...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CIKM
• Authors: Gang Luo, Chunqiang Tang, Hao Yang, Xing Wei
• Keywords: CIKM 2008, Handle Medical Search, Information Management, Medical, Web Search Engine