I’ve had a nasty cough for the last couple of weeks, so this is very timely. In this week’s Tool Tuesday column I’ve picked three different symptom checkers to find out if the cough will go away on its own or if I need to go see a doctor.

Here we go. The sites I’ll be looking at are Healthline.com, QualityHealth.com and HealthCentral.com.

1. Healthline.com

Healthline.com symptom checker

Healthline’s symptom search lets you search for symptoms in a menu, which takes you to a series of possible causes.

Healthline.com cough symptom causes

This list helps you match the other symptoms you are having in combination with the cough. In this way it is exceptionally easy to find the causes that match your actual symptoms. Lucky for me, I just have a cough.

Clicking on the first cause takes you through to information pertinent to having just a cough, providing a definition, common causes, home care, when to call your doctor and what to expect when you visit your healthcare provider. The information is relevant, to the point and very well presented.

2. QualityHealth.com

QualityHealth.com uses a different approach:

QualityHealth symptom checker

Scrolling over the body and clicking on the body part that is affected, you are provided a list of potential symptoms to choose from.

QualityHealth list of symptoms in the chest region

This certainly is a more visual way of dealing with symptoms, although for the cough, I wasn’t sure whether to pick chest or throat – as I have a chesty cough, but also a sore throat. (Yes, I know it sounds like a garden variety cold, but humor me.)

Searching for cough brings up very similar information to that presented at Healthline. However, it does not take you deeper to further causes, which Healthline does.

3. HealthCentral.com

HealthCentral.com starts its symptom checker by asking who is experiencing the symptoms (you can bypass this and go to its full list of symptoms, which takes you to an alphabetical listing of all symptoms):

HealthCentral symptom checker

Clicking on the relevant gender (or child), you’ll be taken to a new page asking you for the body part affected. This time, cough is categorized together with colds.

HealthCentral cough and cold symptom checker

Cough and cold provides a summary about the topic. Unlike the other sites, HealthCentral.com also provides you with the option to take an assessment. Are you ready for the gory details?

HealthCentral symptom assessment

I have a soar throat.

HealthCentral symptom assessment

I have none of these symptoms.

I think you get the gist. I went through four further questions to find out the verdict – a common cold and that I should just rest up.

The detail in this search is as deep as Healthline.com, so it all depends on how you like to receive information – upfront in a list that provides related symptoms or through a series of questions.

I’m off to buy some OTC cough medicine.

When it comes to online advertising I think we all suffer from "banner blindness". And sure, even if the ads are now more relevant – and we can thank Google AdSense for that – ads still take us through to brand or other advertising pages. What banner ads are lacking is relevancy in combination with action. That's where we believe “product info2purchase ads” come into play.

Let's say you are visiting everydayhealth.com. Your spouse has just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, so you've turned to the web to learn more about it.

EveryDayHealth Diabetes page

As you're browsing the page, you come across an ad called "From the Health MarketPlace" and it lists products that relate to diabetes.

MarketPlace product info2purchase ad

As it happens, on your shopping list are lancets and strips, which you were going to buy from the pharmacy. Curious about what merchant is offering these strips and how it is they are offering 57 different strips, you click on the link.

MarketPlace products

Pleasantly surprised you find that it takes you to an entire marketplace of several merchants and the products they offer side-by-side to help you easily comparison shop.

No matter whether you then decide to buy the strips from an online merchant or in a pharmacy, you know what companies manufacture the strips, you can read more about each product, read consumer reviews of each product and learn what they cost from online merchants.

OK, here comes the techy stuff.

We're about to publicly announce the launch of the HealthPricer product info2purchase advertising platform – the first data-driven advertising platform to both create and serve contextual product ads on the fly. These ads appear on partner pages and will match products to relevant content. EverydayHealth.com, for example, is delivering close to 7 million HealthPricer ad impressions per month.

This new online advertising model stems from the fact that HealthPricer aggregates and categorizes hundreds of thousands of health products sold online by the top health and beauty retailers. We have gained a reputation as one of the best online resources for consumers looking for all they need to know about health products – be it exact ingredients, articles written by experts, where to buy the product and reviews from other consumers. HealthPricer's product ads take all that information and deliver it back to the consumer – making advertisements more relevant and actionable to consumers. Rather than serving third party banner ads that direct consumers to brand or advertiser pages, HealthPricer serves relevant product-focused ads created by HealthPricer that take consumers to purchasing pages.

We have plans to continue to develop the display of these ads - not just relevant products, but using parameters from the entire dataset of transaction data we collect. So for example, the most popular products sold related to the content page topic or the most consumer-recommended products related to the content page topic.

Did you know you can now buy glasses online? Yes, frames and prescription lenses – the lot. We’ve trawled the Net for the most user-friendly sites for buying eyeglasses and prescription sunglasses. Here are a couple of picks and how the ordering process works.

First up, ClearlyContacts.com.

1. ClearlyContacts.com

Venturing online to buy frames may not seem like the most natural purchase. Most of us want to try on the frames to see how they fit and feel. ClearlyContacts.com has thought about this and they, as part of the ordering process, send you a trial pack of four frames to try on “in the comfort of your own home”.

Buying eyeglasses from ClearlyContacts

Before you start ordering eyeglasses online, you need a prescription from an optician as all reputable online merchants will be asking you to send that prescription to them for verification.

Let’s start. I’ve chosen to browse the metal frames and have added four to my trial pack. ClearlyContacts.com only allows me to choose the cheaper frames to add to my trial pack, but there’s still a good choice of frames to pick from.

ClearlyContacts trial pack order

Clicking on the order trial pack button takes you through to the order screen where you fill in your address. This is where the experience takes us offline, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

The trial pack arrived within the week with the exact frames I asked to try on. In the pack is a pen, where they ask you to mark the centre of your pupil on each of the lenses. The pack also contains an order slip, so once you have decided on which frame you like, you fill in this form and send the entire package with a photocopy of your prescription in the pre-paid package provided. It couldn’t be more simple. The eyeglasses I ordered arrived a week later – and I saved over $150 compared to retail prices. (If you don’t like any of the frames you’ve ordered in the trial pack, just send them back. There is no commitment to buy.)

I really liked this process. Given the opportunity to try on the frames took away the worry that I’d spend money on frames that may not suit me and the order was handled in a very timely fashion.

2. FramesDirect.com

Similar to ClearlyContacts, FramesDirect finds another solution around the need to try on the frames before you order the glasses.

FrameFinder Virtual Try-On

You can upload your photo and the FrameFinder Virtual Try-On will superimpose the glasses on your face – the above is the demo model. I did download my photo and superimposed the frames I recently bought on top of the FrameFinder Virtual Try-On photo and it worked really well. The dimensions of the glasses matched my face well, which answered my question as to whether the glasses would be wider or narrower than expected once ordered.

Once you’ve selected the frame you want, will be asked for the exact size frame and the lens type you want.

FramesDirect selection process

FramesDirect then takes you through a detailed and self-explanatory order process – the prescription you need for each eye, verifying the prescription, checking the order is correct and completing the order.

FramesDirect order progress

If you are in the market for a new pair of glasses (be they prescription or sunglasses) trying the online merchants is well worth it. You’ll end up with great savings and happy with the result.

We receive regular questions from people using HealthPricer and thought it would be useful to share some of these questions with our blog readers. So every Friday, we'll pick a question of the week and respond to it. Here's this week's question.

Can a prescription from the US be filled by your facility?

Yes, you can fill US prescriptions with any of the online pharmacy merchants in our program. Just to clarify, HealthPricer (www.healthpricer.com) is a comparison shopping website. We list hundreds of thousands of consumer healthcare products on our site from trusted online merchants, but we don't actually sell the products ourselves. When it comes to prescription drugs, all of the drugs listed on our site are verified as FDA approved drugs, from certified online pharmacy merchants based in either Canada or the United States.

When you search for a specific product/drug on our site, you will be presented with a product comparison page that lists all of the merchants selling that specific product/drug along with their pricing. Once you select a merchant that you would like to purchase from, you simply click on the "Go To Store" button and you will be redirected to the merchant's shopping cart to complete your transaction. Note that for prescription drug orders you will be required to send in (fax/mail) a valid prescription in order to have your order fulfilled.

Click on go to store

Clciking on go to store takes you through to merchant's shopping cart

If you have questions for HealthPricer you can either submit them in the comment below or e-mail us at info@healthpricer.com.

I thought we’d ease gently into the “behind the scenes” at HealthPricer to look at how we changed our price seals. Looking back on this case, we showed a tendency to over-complicate how we highlighted the “best” prices – to the extent that we were not only confusing visitors to our site, but also team members internally. To be perfectly frank, I even confused myself when writing this blog post and had to rewrite sections.

We used to have two different price seals – best price and best value - and a lowest price.

Here’s how the best price seal used to look on our site.

How Best Price seal used to look on HealthPricer

And when you’d scroll down you’d see a best price seal and a best value seal – on the same page. What’s the difference? How do I choose from these seals?

To make this even more complicated, we had also incorporated lowest price.

What do all these prices mean? Well, lowest price is what it is – the lowest total price available before shipping and handling. Best price, is the lowest price per quantity breakdown before handling and shipping - quantity meaning, number of boxes, tablets, liquid oz, etc. Best value is the lowest price per unit available in multiple quantities AFTER handling and shipping. You tend to think that the highest discount is for the largest quantity of products, but that is not always the case.

The same confusion appears in our e-mail alerts. Some of you may have tried this service; we provide alerts for customers that are sent to them via e-mail daily/weekly alerts on the price range of the product they are interested in or when the product they are interested drops below a certain price.

HealthPricer e-mail alert

Can you imagine the confusion? Consider receiving this kind of e-mail: “The product you have chosen has dropped to $39.80. You can also buy this product at its best price at $42.40 or at its best value at $151.30.” Excuse me?

We had to simplify things, both on the site and in the e-mail alerts.

Here’s how we’re now approaching the presentation of prices and price seals.

The lowest price is now presented as “starting at”:

HealthPricer "starting at" prices for Norvasc

The best price, which has been sitting at the top of each category for a while, has simply been highlighted in green. It is pretty self-explanatory that it is the “best” price for that category.

Norvasc best prices on HealthPricer

We post the best value price at the top of each results page, so that it is easily accessible and we indicate in the results table where that product is the best value.

Norvasc best value at top of HealthPricer search results page

Norvasc best value in table displaying all prices on HealthPricer

As for the e-mail alerts, we either provide the range of prices, or when the price has dropped below the price the consumer has asked for, and the best value. The below option asked for a daily alert for Zocor, but not for a specific price alert. So customers have more choice in how they prefer to receive e-mail alerts.

E-mail alert received from HealthPricer

The presentation of prices and price seals are still not perfect and we’re still evolving these features.