A follow-up to yesteday’s post on HealthBase:
It wasn’t what I was thinking of when I provided a caveat regarding Wikipedia being used as a source, but apparently some search results have offbeat listings, occasionally with negative associations.
My caveat was in regards to the fact that Wikipedia is what I call a “starting point” for information search, not a source itself. This actually places it in the same category as HealthBase, in that one should not take any particular piece of information as accurate, but to use the information to follow to primary sources and develop search terms and a broader understanding of the topic.
On HealthBase’s problem: this is to be expected with new methods of indexing and searching, and this type of problem will tend to show itself with a broad base of users. I still think it is a great starting point for health information searches, and that the searching algorithm will become more sophisticated over time.
