Legal Research

MedlinePlus Search Clouds

Recently MedlinePlus introduced a nifty feature called search clouds.   These “clouds” are arranged alphabetically and display the top 100 searches run using the MedlinePlus search box, with the size of the cloud representing the number of times that term was searched.  A term’s exact search ranking can be obtained by placing your cursor over the term.  The “collection” of clouds are updated each week day.  Clicking on a search term cloud runs a search for the term in MedlinePlus and links the searcher to the results.

The National Library of Medicine created this search cloud feature to provide insight into the search behavior of MedlinePlus users and to gauge current public interest in major health issues.   For example, today (6/16/09) one of the larger clouds (most searched term) is “swine flu” (ranked 1out of 100).

For any blog readers unfamiliar with MedlinePlus, it is a good starting place to obtain  information about a disease or condition, whether or not you search the site or use the search clouds.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on June 16, 2009 (boomark / email).