Bing Health

Bing Health (previously Live Search Health) is a health-related search service as part of Microsoft's Bing search engine. It is a search engine specifically for health-related information through a variety of trusted and credible sources, including Medstory, Mayo Clinic, National Institutes of Health's MedlinePlus, as well as from Wikipedia.[1]

Bing Health
Screenshot
Bing Health displaying results of the search term "Common Cold"
Type of site
Search engine
OwnerMicrosoft
URLwww.bing.com
LaunchedJanuary 12, 2010 (2010-01-12)

History

Bing Health comes about as a result of the Microsoft's acquisition of Medstory in February 2007, gaining a foothold in the health search and health information market.[2][3] It was released for beta testing on October 8, 2007 as Live Search Health and served as the front-end to Microsoft HealthVault Search. Search results in Live Search Health were presented in a three-column layout with health-related articles from the trusted sources in the left, web search results in the middle, and sponsored results on the right. The topic dashboard also displays relevant topics, and allow users to add the search results to their scrapbook in Microsoft HealthVault Account. One particular feature for Live Search Health is that all health search queries and responses were encrypted to provide a measure of privacy and security when dealing with health issues.[4]

However, on June 3, 2009, the Live Search Health front-end became fully integrated into Bing search results, accessible only via the "Explorer pane" on the left when the contextual search engine detects a health-related search query entered.[5]

On January 10, 2010, Bing Health search results got an upgrade. Typing in a specific illness will now highlight important information such as related conditions, and common medications to reduce symptoms. In addition reference materials and documentation about the disease and its history can be shown.[6][7]

Bing Health is only available in the United States

See also

References
  1. Husain, Iltifat (29 June 2010). "Bing Health's new additions make it a legitimate alternative to WebMD and Wikipedia for healthcare". iMedical Apps (MedPage Today).
  2. Microsoft Press Release: Microsoft Demonstrates Further Commitment to Healthcare Market With Planned Acquisition of Web Search Company Archived December 18, 2007, at the Wayback Machine on 2007-02-26
  3. Macmanus, Richard (26 February 2007). "Microsoft Acquires Health Search Engine, Medstory - The Continued Rise of Vertical Search. Microsoft has acquired Medstory, a vertical search engine for health information. This is an interesting development in a few ways - but in terms of Web tech trends, because it's another sign of the rise of vertical search engines. We've written before about how VSE such as Retrevo are beginning to make their presence felt, alongside generic search…". Read Write.
  4. Kolakowski, Nicholas (22 April 2009). "Microsoft's HealthVault a Challenge to Google Health?". eWeek.
  5. Spring, Tom (28 May 2009). "Hands On With Bing, Microsoft's New Search Engine". PC World.
  6. Bringing Knowledge into Health Search
  7. Blakenhorn, Dana (25 June 2010). "Microsoft Bing upgrades its health service". ZDNet.
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