Trip (search engine)

The site was created in 1997 as a search tool to help the staff of ATTRACT answer clinical questions for GPs in Gwent, South Wales. Shortly afterwards Bandolier highlighted the Trip Database in its Web Watch from 1999 and this helped establish the site. In 2003, after a period of steady growth, Trip became a subscription-only service. This was abandoned In September 2006 and in 2015 followed a freemium business model. Originally "Trip" stood for Turning Research Into Practice, but the system is now simply called Trip.[1]

The core to Trip’s system is the identification and incorporation of new evidence. The people behind Trip are heavily involved in clinical question answering systems (e.g., NLH Q&A Service). Therefore, if resources are identified that are useful in the Q&A process they tend to be added to Trip. In addition Trip has an active network of users that help identify new sources of evidence.

A site survey (September 2007) showed that the site was searched over 500,000 times per month, with 69% from health professionals and 31% from members of the public. Of the health professionals around 43% are doctors. Most users come from either the United Kingdom or the United States. In September 2008 the site was searched 1.4 million times. To date the site has been searched over 100 million times.

In 2019 a decision was made, due to very old coding, to recode the entire site. In July 2021 the new front-end was released and in September 2022 the back-end was also released.

• Trip
• Using the Turning Research Into Practice (TRIP) database: how do clinicians really search? an evaluation of the website.
• Reviews: From Systematic to Narrative review of the site
• Evidence Based Pyramid a pictorial representation of TRIP's approach to the evidence