July 26, 2007

Did you know that taking fish oil while pregnant can boost your child’s hand-eye coordination?

Or that the breathing techniques in yoga might help you manage asthma?

Or that chocolate can help boost your mood, especially if you suffer from depression?

Thanks to the improved MSN Health & Fitness site search, these are just some examples of the type of information you can discover while searching on a health condition.

MSN Health & Fitness has re-launched its site search using Medstory, an intelligent search engine acquired by Microsoft in March. Thanks to the Medstory technology, you not only will receive better results than our previous site search, you can discover a host of related topics to the keyword you searched on via the “dashboard” feature.

Here’s how it works. When you enter search terms, Medstory displays a host of related health topics, broken into several categories. At the top of the results, you’ll see what’s called a dashboard, which looks like the image above.

As you can see in the image above, the dashboard is made of up to six categories. Under each is a list of related health topics most pertinent to your search term. The color bar next to each topic illustrates its degree of relevance to the topic you searched.

For example, in the dashboard above, the search term is pregnancy. Under the category Tests & Procedures, Caesarean Section is the top related topic. However, did you know that pregnancy and fish oilare related? Look under the Nutrition category and you'll see fish oilas one of the topics.

That's the advantage of the dashboard: You can find both the related information you expected and some that you didn't. (Click view additional topics to see an expanded version of the dashboard, which shows a complete list of related topics.)

Other advantages to our new search:

You can refine your search seamlessly. Just click on one of the topics in the dashboard. For example, if you do a search on pregnancy and you clicked fish oil under Nutrition, a pop-up appears that gives you the option to either get search results for pregnancy + fish oil or to perform a new search on just fish oil.

You can easily expand your search. The search results below the dashboard are directly related to your search term. The first tab displays results from MSN Health & Fitness; the second tab gives results from other Web sites using Live Search results with a Medstory health filter.

You can still use our search in the traditional manner. Just type search terms into the search field at the top of the page and examine the results below the dashboard.

Visitors to MSN Health & Fitness will realize many benefits from the Medstory integration that makes MSN the place to come for the health-news consumer or the discerning patient. Those benefits include improved content grouping for more relevant search results and the inclusion of Live Search Web results for a wider choice of information.

Check out the new site search at MSN Health & Fitness and then send off a note in the box at upper right, offering your feedback.

Sue Lohman is the senior product manager for MSN's Health & Fitness channel.