Trip Database Blog

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.

Interesting interview with one of the people responsible for Microsoft’s QnA service click here.

We get a large number of questions on individual drugs. Unfortunately, most of the robust resources ‘hide behind’ a firewall and require an expensive subscription to obtain the information. It’s a bit like the Cochrane situation (see previous post) in that (I imagine) the taxpayers have paid for the initial research and development and then have to pay for re-accessing the same information.

I accept that many of these resources require significant input regarding appraising, searching, editing etc. So what’s the solution, perhaps via another great resource highlighted on Ben’s blog. This time it’s an open-access, wiki-based, drug resource called PubDrug. It again highlights what can be done with decent tools (wiki) and a bunch of skilled and enthusiastic individuals. Currently, it has 7 monographs. I hope this expands rapidly.

Ben has introduced me to another new blog, this time for Andrew McAfee. I’ve been discussing Gwagle with Ben for a while now and Andrew McAfee (Associate Professor at Harvard Business School) appears to be doing some very important analysis and thinking. He devised the SLATES pneumonic, which has been handily re-written (so I can understand it) by another blog:

Search: Find what you need, enhanced by emergent description (see tags, below)

Links: More to the point, link relationships or link ranking algorithms

Authoring: Ease of content creation – spare me the angle brackets, make it bone simple

Tags: What do my colleagues call this? I bet it works better than what the IT department calls it

Extensions: If you thought X was [good interesting important useful], you might, by extension find Y similarly so

Signals: tell me something has changed

The purpose of SLATES is “it helps expose how platforms and channels can be brought closer and made more effective in ways that enhance productivity and effectiveness. Yes, we’ve seen most of these elements before. It is in the ease of recombination that they change how things work.”

For those of you with enough willpower to have read this blog for any length of time will realise that, at the start of each month, I tend to give the search stats for the previous month. I imagine I’ll stop when the stats stop going up! But, for February (a short month) we were searched 433,260 times (up from January’s 365,855) – see graph below.

At long last we’ve got a half-decent web-analysis package attached. From that we can also see, in February, we had over 3 million page views. No wonder our web-company is moaning about our band width usage!

An interesting story on the Read/WriteWeb blog and an interesting product. I’ll have to look through the site to see if there are any features that might improve TRIP!

As an owner of a Nintendo Wii (for the children, of course….) I like to hear stories of the health benefits. This was a nice story!

ResearchBuzz have created a new search function, Just Ask Anybody, based on 75 Ask-An-Expert and Ask-A-Librarian Web sites. It works pretty well, I’m impressed!

1. Infection control – sure you can disinfect it, but clinicians can wash their hands between patients – do they?
2. Security (1) – very tempting for thieves
3. Security (2) – will it make it easier for people to access files via hacking wi-fi, ‘borrowing’ theclipboard etc.

But overall, it seems an exciting development!