One of the things I’ve learned since I began blogging about health and medicine in November 2006 is that online discussion and debate helps people make better decisions. As I’ve become involved in the Health 2.0 movement, I’ve reached the much larger conclusion that this movement is going to transform the entire healthcare system. Why? Because Health 2.0 tools and communities help people to make better healthcare choices — thus becoming smarter consumers.

We created a comparison search engine, and then a social network, on our site so our members could make smarter buying decisions. One of the main reasons that people who use our site make better decisions is that, by coming to eDrugSearch.com before making a purchase, they are less likely to jump to hasty (and wrong) conclusions — about what medicine to take or what pharmacy to choose.

Unfortunately, eDrugSearch.com has a competitor in the comparison search engine business who does jump to hasty (and wrong) conclusions. The company’s name is HealthPricer and its CEO has written a ridiculous, irresponsible blog item accusing eDrugSearch.com of stealing code from their site in our recent redesign.

We were most annoyed that they insulted our site’s lead developer, Greg, by calling him a “junior developer” and accusing him of somehow cutting and pasting HealthPricer code to add a “set your price” slider and some other features to our search engine results pages (SERPs). Such features, of course, are not rocket science and are available on specialty search engines across multiple industries. Nevertheless, Greg had this to say in response:

Any person who understands basic HTML (even including a junior developer) can look at the source code or source files of the site and see that they are not the same. They’re not even close to being the same. Everything is built from scratch except for some open-source scripts that were modified to fit on the site.

So does that mean HealthPricer’s developers can’t see these obvious differences — or that HealthPricer CEO Michael Brown jumped to a hasty (and wrong) conclusion? And if the answer is the latter, the question becomes: Why? Why would Michael Brown make these accusations?

I will not make the mistake that Michael Brown has made and jump to a hasty conclusion. Instead, I will offer the facts below merely as fodder for speculation as to Michael Brown’s true motives for his blog post:

1. eDrugSearch.com started a blog in November 2006. HealthPricer started a blog in July 2007.

2. eDrugSearch.com added RSS feeds to its SERPs in February 2007. HealthPricer added RSS feeds to its SERPs in July 2007. Michael Brown proudly announced his tardy introduction of this feature on his blog.

3. HealthPricer added a “Narrow Results By” filter on its SERPs months after we did. They used to do it this way:

4. eDrugSearch.com had a pharmacy directory with individual pharmacy profile pages, including pharmacy ratings, when our site first went live in mid-2006 (before our official launch). HealthPricer added a very similar pharmacy directory in early 2007.

Interesting, isn’t it?

If we might make a prediction, we’ll add a No. 5:

5. HealthPricer will add a social network similar to ours by the end of 2008.

Of course, we never posted about any of these interesting coincidences when they happened, because (1) we had no evidence (and still don’t) that they copied us; and (2) we’re big boys who understand how the marketplace works. When we come to work, we bring our hard hats — not our pacifiers.

We also know that HealthPricer CEO Michael Brown has a history of taking shots at his competitors, like Shopzilla and Pricerunner.

So in response to HealthPricer’s ridiculous post, I have to simply say, “Buyer beware.” If they’ll jump to faulty conclusions in the name of their egos, what else will they do to put their own self-interest above accurately serving their blog readers and, by extention, their customers?