HealthContentAdvisors

DeepDyve’s Free Search Tools Enhance Patient Community Sites

• Posted May 27th 2009
• by Janice

DeepDyve, a relatively new search engine (formerly known as Infovell), uses an approach to search that helps both novices and search experts find relevant information.  DeepDyve is particularly useful in finding related information once one has found an article that includes information that is on-point.  The user can simply copy the desired sections or full article into the search box and DeepDyve will find related information within the body of information searched by the DeepDyve engine. 

Today (May 27) DeepDyve announced the availability of several tools for website and blog publishers that allow them to incorporate DeepDyve search functionality on their own sites.  The first, DeepDyve’s “More Like This Content” widget allows websites to offer its users a richer search experience by including results from content indexed by DeepDyve.  DeepDyve searches a large (and growing) body of scholarly content that includes many medical journals not fully searchable on the open Web.  Clicking on the More Like This icon retrieves and displays links to related information from DeepDyve.  Advanced search provides an option to limit searches to particular types of content, such as patents or clinical trials.

Today’s announcement also includes a “Content Highlight” widget that can be used to search content within a website. Users highlight a block of text/data (up to 5,000 characters) and run the highlighted text as a search query.  Obviously, the site must be indexed by DeepDyve; there is an option to have the “Content Highlight” widget search other content in the DeepDyve index.  Both of these tools are available for free and are ad-supported.  See here for details.

Finally, there is a plug-in for WordPress bloggers (also free) that uses the text of the blog to automatically retrieve and display links to related content from DeepDyve’s index.  This feature should be especially useful on patient community sites.  I plan to implement this plug-in on the Health Content Advisors blog, but I also encourage bloggers and website publishers with more medically-focused content to explore using these widgets.  It takes a little time to adjust to the DeepDyve search method, but for research applications the benefits quickly become apparent.