The Rare Disease Search Engine That Outperforms Google | MIT Technology Review

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The Rare Disease Search Engine That Outperforms Google | MIT Technology Review: 


Exerpt:

"The problem (using google to search for rare diseases), of course, is that  common-or-garden search engines are not optimised for this process. Google, for example, considers pages important if they are linked to by other important pages, the basis of its famous PageRank algorithm. However, rare diseases by definition are unlikely to have a high profile on the web. What’s more, searches are likely to be plagued with returns from all sorts of irrelevant sources.

Although still a research project, Dragusin and co have made their rare disease search engine publicly available at www.findzebra.com. This could clearly become a valuable tool for the medical community.

What is less clear, however, is how this tool will be used by the general public. The site comes with the forlorn message: “Warning! FindZebra is a research project and it is to be used only by medical professionals” ."

Read the full article here.

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