FAQ

What are some of the new features of the Healthcare 100?

Along with adding and changing the weighting of metrics, we’ve incorporated some cool new features to help you get more out of the Healthcare 100 –

Healthcare 100 Blog Search: You can now search for specific blogs in the Healthcare 100 and quickly find their Healthcare 100 stats.

Healthcare 100 Blog Content Search: You can now search the content of blogs listed in the Healthcare 100. Want to see who’s been writing about a specific topic? Here’s an easy way to find out. We’ve created an index based on the content from Healthcare 100 blogs, which is updated throughout the week.

Recent Posts Popup: An icon of a plus sign is listed with each Healthcare 100 blog, which allows you to view a popup window displaying recent posts from that blog.

OPML Feed: This includes all feeds in the Healthcare 100.

Customized Healthcare 100 Badge: We’ve added a new JavaScript badge, customized for your blog, that you can easily add to your site. Just find your blog in the list and click on the badge icon to grab it.

My blog has the wrong country flag. Can you fix it?

Absolutely. Just and tell us the proper national flag to associate with your blog, and we'll change it right away.

How often is the Healthcare 100 updated?

A general update is run twice a week (early Monday and Friday mornings). Any increase or decrease in a blog's ranking (as reflected in the far left column) is based on the previous update.

How do blogs qualify to be part of the Healthcare 100?

Obviously, only the most influential blogs make the top 100 -- but any blog with a focus on health and medicine will be added to our list. If you only write occasionally about health-related issues, we use our discretion in determining whether your blog belongs.

Why do you have a ranking for Bloglines subscribers but not Feedburner or Google Reader subscribers?

Believe us, we don't have a financial interest in Bloglines! Unfortunately, not all bloggers use Feedburner, and Google Reader doesn't currently have an API that allows us to automate stat retrieval. So Bloglines is currently our best proxy for measuring subscriber numbers.

Why does the list fluctuate so much?

The main reason for the fluctuations -- particularly among the lower ranking blogs -- is that we sometimes collect inaccurate data from one of our sources, or experience some other kind of technical glitch. This can dramatically affect the rankings for some blogs. However, for any single blog, fluctuations are rare. Our research shows that most weeks, the rankings for about 95 percent of the 900+ blogs in our system are accurate.

How do I improve my eDrugSearch.com score?

We'll be honest. We don't read 900+ blogs every day. So if you believe you've upgraded your content since we last gave you a score, please drop us a line and we'll check out your blog again.

I have more questions!

In that case, just e-mail us and we'll try to respond within 24 hours.

Why was my blog rejected?

We require that blogs submitted to the Healthcare 100 be up and running for two full months before we'll add them to the list. We also require that the majority of the blog's content pertains to issues related to health and medicine.

Why don't you use other metrics?

We've picked the best data sources we could find with open APIs. If you know of another source you think we should add, and we'll check it out.