Customer Service
3 June 2008
Womenshealth.gov Delivers Critical Medical Information with Vivisimo’s Velocity Search Platform
Improved Government Website Aims to be Authoritative Source for Women’s Health Information
Pittsburgh, PA — Women searching for authoritative information on vital health issues now have an improved online source, womenshealth.gov, provided by the Office on Women’s Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The site relies on powerful search technology developed by Vivisimo Inc. (vivisimo.com), a leading provider of enterprise search software and expertise. Vivisimo also powers Kids.Gov, Consumer.Gov and USA.gov—the master government portal through which millions of visitors access government information every year.
Womenshealth.gov is designed to be a one-stop shop where detailed information can be quickly found about the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illnesses and health conditions that affect women. The site provides a variety of audiences—including consumers, health providers and researchers—with a single, non-commercial and highly credible source for in-depth, relevant and timely information about women’s health issues.
When searching for information about health issues, it’s often difficult to determine whether you have found the definitive source. Using Vivisimo’s Velocity Search Platform, womenshealth.gov presents comprehensive results in an easy-to-navigate interface. From an administrator’s perspective, Vivisimo’s flexible platform deploys quickly and is easily edited to ensure search results are continually refined to be the most relevant for users.
Using Vivisimo’s award-winning technology, womenshealth.gov makes available a vast collection of information provided by a large number of organizations, databases, web sites and documents. All told, womenshealth.gov is a gathering place for more than 1,800 organizations, 4,300 publication resources and 800 different health topics related to women’s health.
Organizing this information and making it readily available required a new approach to quickly searching and efficiently presenting results from so many different information repositories. For example, users searching on the term “diet and exercise,” will see a box of highlighted information in the middle of their computer screen, including an FAQ on dieting concerns along with tabbed entries for diet “News,” “Clinical Trials” on diet and weight-loss studies, and “Guidelines” for health professionals in managing health issues related to diet and weight.
Beneath the highlight box, results for the keyword search are also organized by additional tabbed entries. These entries help users quickly explore different areas of interest related to their selected key words. One of the tabs presents search results from Spanish language sources.
Finally, on the left, search results are grouped into thematic or clustered entries, a patented process from Vivisimo to help users see in a compact view the broad categories of information and the number of documents in each category related to their search terms. Users simply click on the different clusters to refine their view of information.
“Providing timely, relevant and comprehensive search results from government web sites is a complex problem due to the wide variety of information types and sources on such sites. Vivisimo’s expertise in simplifying the complexity for both consumers and site administrators has been earned over years of experience with many government sites,” said Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO and co-founder of Vivisimo. “Our work with womenshealth.gov demonstrates how that expertise benefits a new group of consumers, who can take advantage of large amounts of credible information to quickly and easily find exactly what they need in a crucial area of research.”
About Vivisimo
Vivisimo does search right by combining the simplicity and innovation of consumer search with the flexibility and control of enterprise software. The company works with customers to understand their goals and quickly deploy solutions that maximize the business value of information—with an interface users love. Vivisimo serves its global client base through headquarters in Pittsburgh, PA, and Paris, France, and partners throughout the world. Please visit vivisimo.com to learn more about us and visit our Search Done Right blog to learn more about enterprise search.
