Semantic Search Engine Hakia announced today that they’ve added Credibility as a determinant factor in their search engine for all health related searches. They list Credibility, Freshness and Relevancy as the main 3 factors.

What do they mean by credibility? How does a site become credible? Well, the way they’ve done it is to take the Medical Library Association’s list of quality health web sites, and say that any site on that list is credible as far as they’re concerned (link builders, head over there and get your medical clients listed). Any results that are from one of these credible sites are then shown above the regular listings, and are displayed in red.

So does credibility make a difference to the user experience? Well, the first issue is that there’s no key for the user to understand why these listings are in red, and others not. Not all searches produces ‘credible’ results, i.e. a search for treating a strained calf muscle produced 0 credible results. Credible sites get to double dip - if a credible result is in the organic results it will display in both the credible and non-credible results, which can reduce the feeling of freshness. Also, I would assume that the hope is that a credible resource should also be a relevant resource, that’s not always the case. For example, in the search that I did below for “recurring knee pain” the first result is not from a medical site, but from Al Jazeera talking about an A.C. Milan player with that problem.

Now, Hakia is still a beta product, so it isn’t fair to judge them on a non finished product, and they are at least trying out different things, but as to whether this will be something that can catapult them to the forefront, or even into the pack behind the leading pack remains to be seen.