U-MedSearch: A Meta Search Engine of Medical Content for Different Users and Learning Needs

Abstract

More and more people use Internet to look for medical information for understanding and learning but different users, such as experts (e.g., physicians) and consumers (e.g., patients), have different needs and bring different levels of reading ability and prior knowledge. Generic and specific search engines and specialized health sites either do not exploit the whole web or overload users with information of different nature. On the contrary, it is important for a user to immediately find the information on the topic being explored that has the 'right' amount of information and level of complexity. This paper presents a meta search engine of medical information on the web, U-MedSearch, that, for any keyword(s) provides four different lists of terms, and in turn web pages, on the basis of the used language (consumer or expert) and correlation degree (strong or loose) with the keyword(s) thus facilitating the search and learning paths of the different types of learners.