It’s taken a fair bit of R&D to arrive at this point (and we’re still not sure on one point) but we’ve finalised our latest batch of improvements:

  • Results page re-design. There is too much wasted space on the current TRIP results page and I wanted to make better use of it. This is especially important for two reasons. Firstly, we’ll be moving our Google Ads to there to improve performance (given our search stats we’ve made little money using that method). Secondly, we may be incorporating snippets into our search results (more below).
  • Conclusions. Many of our publications (e.g. Cochrane, DARE, BMJ Updates, JAMA) have clear conclusions. We’ve created a system to grab and display these (via a rollover) without having to visit the actual paper.
  • Improved advanced search. Currently, the search doesn’t work, from a flow perspective, as I would like. Therefore, we’ll improve how that works, making it much more user friendly.
  • PDFs. Highlight which results are PDFs
  • RSS feeds. When doing a search you’ll be able to drag the RSS button to your RSS reader and new search results, for that search, will be highlighted.
  • Specialist search engines. We’ll be creating a significant number of specialist search engines. These will be in specialities such as cardiology, mental health, nursing etc. If you use a specialist search you’ll be able to just search the content of the top 10-20 journals in that area.
  • Synonyms. These are currently being reviewed, edited and overhauled to further enhance them.

The one uncertainty is still snippets. Snippets are the small summaries that you see in general search engines. To date our attempts to create adequate ones have been unsuccessful. However, we’ve got one more trick to try! Why are we so interested in snippets? We feel that they can better improve document selection, improving the search experience.

These improvements will be released, by May. However, some (namely the conclusions) will be released earlier.