Abstract:

In this paper we analyze and discuss the importance of health portals having intelligent features, and how their presence helps in meeting users’ demands for finding relevant information online. We identify a set of intelligent features that the portal should have in order to satisfy users’ demands for timely and accurate information retrieval. In particular, we specify push and pull features as the ones the portals should have integrated for this purpose. Not claiming that the proposed list of features is the most comprehensive, we however, trust that it is almost the
minimum guaranteeing that the intelligent functions will satisfy the users’ information needs. 22 health portals and search engines have been analyzed in order to critically assess presence of these features and their role in retrieving relevant health information online. Some recommendations for the future implementation are derived based on the results of the conducted analysis.