The National Library of Medicine launched a new feature on MedlinePlus today. On both MedlinePlus and MedlinePlus en español, search clouds will be displayed that show the most frequently searched terms for both sites:

MedlinePlus Search Cloud: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/cloud.html
MedlinePlus en español Search Cloud: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/spanish/cloud.html

The MedlinePlus search cloud displays the top 100 English searches, and the MedlinePlus en español search cloud displays the top 100 Spanish searches. The search clouds are linked from the MedlinePlus and MedlinePlus en español homepages.

The search clouds are usually updated every week day. The search terms appear in alphabetical order, and their size represents their relative frequency. The bigger the term, the more often it is searched by people who visit MedlinePlus. A term’s exact ranking is found by placing your cursor over the term, and you can click on any term in the search cloud to conduct a search for that term in MedlinePlus.

As the most popular searches change over time and with the seasons, visitors can see the dynamic and diverse interests of MedlinePlus users. For instance, the term “tick bites” might appear in the cloud during the summer, and the term “frostbite” might appear in the winter.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 9:58 am and is filed under Classes, Consumer Health, General (all entries), NLM Announcements, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.