Looks like Microsoft has taken one step ahead of Google this time, when it officially unveiled the company’s latest online offering, the Microsoft HealthVault. The HealthVault is an online information storage facility made specifically for users’ medical information. It gives users free access to a highly secured online database fully controlled by the users.
From the words of Peter Neupert, corporate vice president of the Health Solutions Group at Microsoft on what the objective of the HealthVault is:
Our focus is simple: to empower people to lead healthy lives. The launch of HealthVault makes it possible for people to collect their private health information on their terms and for companies across the health industry to deliver compatible tools and services built on the HealthVault platform.
I’m not medical practitioner and I’m not interested with medical and health stuff. But what caught my attention while looking at the HealthVault site is the HealthVault search.
Curious as I am on what this HealthVault search can do, I tried searching for diabetes. The search result gave me a comprehensive and well presented search results page with some useful search refinements for the search term.
The HealthVault search presented three categories of results, article, web and sponsored results in three equally distributed column.
The Article Results column presented a comprehensive article on diabetes probably culled from established and freely available medical databases. While the Web results column is pretty self-explanatory, I can’t help but noticed the prominence of the Sponsored Results column.
The Sponsored Results Column contains paid ad links to relevant Amazon products, as well as other paid advertisements. Take note, this column is equally presented with the two other types of search results.
Obviously, the layout and presentation of the HealthVault search results, should the site gains tremendous popularity, would definitely rake in a lot of ad-driven revenue for Microsoft.
Makes you wonder, what really is the main objective of the Healthvault? But of course, Healthvault is a free service, and there is no other way of sustaining that service than sprinkling the site with paid advertisements.
