MammaHealth.com is a new portal for finding health information. It is the health component of the popular search engine called Mamma.com, "the mother of all search engines."

According to Brian Livingston, in Attack of the Health Portals (June 21, 2005) MammaHealth.com the site just launched yesterday and in the article, Nicole Festa, MammaHealth.com p.r. representative, says it "has harnessed the power of the Deep Web by hand-picking the most relevant medical sources for credible health information and crawling deep into the content these sites provide. You can simply type in the word diabetes and instantly get back credible information, not disorganized results leading you to sites trying to sell you pharmaceuticals or information from dubious sources."

Huh well a statement like that just begs me to try this thing out to see if it actually delivers what the public relations people say it will.

Well, I am not all that impressed. Yeah, If you type in "diabetes" you get a nice pretty page with some answers about what causes it, treatment, symptoms, and FAQs. But if you type in other terms such as "HIV", "SARS", or a somewhat technical term the results are less than stellar. In the article Conquering the deep Web? by Dan Farber on ZDNET, "search results for topics like 'poison oak,' 'acid reflux' or 'HIV' weren't that much more useful than what I got at Yahoo or Google, which index some of the same sites as Mammahealth.com. However, Yahoo and Google present more content from drug companies." Farber also mentions that it is unclear as to what "deep web" sites Mammahealth.com is searching. One thing I notice is that there is no consistency between similar terms. For example I searched for "heart attack" and got a the familiar pretty info page that I got with diabetes. But, when I searched for "myocardial infarction" I got different results. There was no definition for "myocardial infarction" nor was there information for causes or symptoms. The search term "heart attack" also produced lovely illustrations (courtesy of Medline Plus) on the results page, however "myocardial infarction" had no pictures.

As you can see from the two examples, the search results were quite different.
See "heart attack" search example.
See "mycardial infarction" search example.

One might say that this is more of a consumer health search engine and consumers are not going to search for things using the same terms that medical professionals would use. I would say BAH!


So if you patients are looking for health information, Mammahealth.com is not the place to go.