Friday, September 4, 2009

HealthBase as a Semantic search engine

HealthBase and the Semantic Fail: " ( from Scienceroll.com)

I wanted to write about Healthbase, a new medical search engine, but David Rothman was faster. He found some serious mistakes in the search itself.

healthbase logo

Well, the concept to reduce the number of results to a definitive list of categories is a good one. But it leads to some mistakes. First, it searches in databases such as Wikipedia. You cannot find a bigger fan of Wikipedia than me, but still it’s not suitable for such a search engine.

Second, sometimes there are strange things in the results. Only one example below. It seems to suggest that a possible treatment for diabetes is mouse. Of course, it just found articles mentioning mouse models in the research of diabetes treatments, but it cannot deal with the information properly.

healthbase

So there are a lot of things to do before becoming the ultimate engine. Until then, my suggestion is Scienceroll Search, the first personalized medical search engine:

scienceroll-search

Speaking for me, I found this a very good search engine for quick reviewing. It is not perfect, but it does a great number of things nobody else can. Really shows you how far search engines have come.


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