When Paul Glasziou evaluated the TRIP Database around 12 months ago he reported that of all the searches 50% resulted in a user following any of the links on the site. Another, pessimistic, way of looking at this is that 50% of users found nothing of interest. So, potentially, a poor result but one that reflects the lack of high quality evidence for all clinical scenarios.

However, an anlysis of the first 10 days of searching using the new interface has shown a dramatic improvement in ‘link outs’. It has now increased to 73%. One could almost say that the move to the new search algorithm has resulted in a 50% improvement in the search experience.