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Thomson Healthcare this week announced a new consumer Web site focused on health information. You can check out the new offering at http://www.pdrhealth.com/home/home.aspx . There’s a variety of information on this site, including drug information, interactions, and alternative therapies. (Yes, Thomson is the publisher of the Physicians’ Desk Reference.)

The page is divided into several tabs of information, including Drugs & Supplements, Diseases & Conditions, and Online Health Tools. (The online health tools include a drug interactivity checker and several profiling tools designed to give you treatment options for various illnesses. These look for the most part like they were developed in conjunction with other Web sites and brought under the PDRhealth aegis. All the ones I looked at required registration.)

The drugs page lets you browse by prescription drugs, over-the-counter remedies, and herbals and supplements. Fisherman’s Friend is in here, though it’s lumped with a bunch of other throat drops under “Menthol”. Even toothpaste is in here. Odd. Anyway, you can also do keyword searches for medicine as well as browse alphabetically. I searched for some pretty obscure things and PDR did not let me down. Information on the drugs includes a general overview, what to do in case of missed dosage, risks, and possible side effects.

You can also browse or search the diseases and conditions page, which covered health issues in a variety of categories. This one is not as exhaustive; I was very surprised to see that there was no listing for autism. I even searched for it and couldn’t find it. With all the attention on it, that seems a curious omission (and things like depression and insomnia and social phobia were listed). And no, I’m not comparing autism to depression or social phobia. But it is a life-changing condition, there is considerable evidence that it’s organic in nature, and it can be treated. So… why not?

There’s a lot of information here, organized well, and it doesn’t take too much digging to get to it. There is a certain amount of advertising and “send us your e-mail address and we’ll send you all kinds of stuff” but it’s not enough to be off-putting and hey, everybody’s got to make a living. Nice to have another credible health information tool.

19 million reviews on two million products. That’s the claim of Summize, a search engine devoted to finding reviews. It’s available at http://www.summize.com/ .

I like review search engines because I like to hear about other user experiences before I shell out a couple hundred bucks for a new camera or monitor or whatever. It works like you think it would: enter the name of a product, model number, etc. I did a search for Diet Dr Pepper — because, well, it’s sitting here on my desk — and got one result, from Amazon, but unfortunately no reviews.

Time to expand a bit. I did another search, this one for acer notebook and got 128 reviews on 54 products. I love the results layout. A bar icon shows, at a glance, how well the product is doing with good, so-so, and bad reviews. The name of the product is shown with a snippet of the review copy (not so useful), source, and sometimes a price.

For getting additional information, you have two choices. You can go straight to the offsite page for product information, you can choose to get a “Summized” page. The Summized page, like this review for an Acer Travelmate, shows the reviews from best to worst, and includes the date of the review and the source. If the review is over a certain size it won’t be shown in its entirety — you’ll have to click a little “more” link to unfold it on the page.

You may do a search where you get an overwhelming number of results, and you find yourself wanting to just get the best products (so you know what to shop for) or the worst products (so you know what to avoid). If you do a search for Toshiba, for example, you’ll get several thousand results. Use the nav on the right to pick only products people mostly loved and you’ll get one set of results (mostly CDs.) Pick products people mostly hated and you’ll get another set of results (mostly electronics.) Sometimes you’ll find that a particular brand gets much love and little hate (Altoids).

You can also do head-to-head comparisons using a vs syntax. For example, you could query coke vs pepsi and get two bar icons summarizing user reviews. (Or try the ever-popular stuffing vs potatoes.) You can also stack additional search terms if you want to compare many things at once.

Lots of information here, very usefully summarized. Don’t forget to check out the blog for new features and data mining results. Now if only there was an RSS feed to get the latest product reviews.

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A new directory has been launched for green products and services. It’s available at http://www.wecanlivegreen.com/ . In addition to the directory, there’s general green information available as well.

You can browse by state or category, or search by keyword. I did a search for clothing which gave me two categories and four subcategories devoted to clothing. I chose children’s clothing and got seven results. None of them seemed to be devoted completely to children’s clothing, with most of them being general clothes stores. The listings included a picture, store name, and one-lane description. Click on the Find Out More link for additional information about the company, including a Web site address and sometimes e-mail. The additional information is pretty minimal, unfortunately. (I also found that doing general keyword searches worked best.)

In addition to the products and services listings the site also offers forums, a “Green Living 101″ tutorial, and a newsletter. There’s a place for products and an event listing, but those places aren’t populated yet. Interesting but I wish there were a little more store information.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .