Health Instant Answers: update and clarification

While posting on the new Health vertical for Live Search, I wasn’t able to show how to get to these answers from just the main Live Search page, and that’s because the Instant Answers functionality is just now starting to roll out.  I asked John Henson, a Product Manager for the Health Solutions Group about it:

Just as with entertainment and commerce searches, queries that are identified as health-related will show up as “instant answers” at the top of mainline search requests. We are testing a few variations of this answer; you can see the primary one here:

healthinstantanswers

We just started running these answers yesterday for a very small percentage of traffic — which is why you haven’t seen them yet. Over the next few weeks they will be ramping up to full coverage.

Thanks for checking out the new search — we’re excited about it! Don’t hesitate to let me know if I can answer any other questions.

As you can see, much of the information that is shown on the https://health.live.com site is shown right on the main page as an Instant Answer, making the information much more easily available.

Comments

  • Mephiles

    Things like that are always helpful if you forget to press “images” or “health” or whatever before searching.

  • Tegument

    Thanks for the info Kip, I also noticed something else new that wasn’t on the site as of yesterday. In the top right you now have the new logo and name “Microsoft HealthVault” and when you sign into this service you have something called a Health Scrapbook, which basically works like the Live Favorites and let’s you save searches. ;)

  • Chris

    Interesting Tegument. Thanks for the info :)

  • foaf

    In order to use the Microsoft HealthVault Scrap Book I was informed I would have to strengthen my password. For me that is a no go, so unfortunately I can’t play :(