October 08, 2009
HealthMash - vertical search
HealthMash is a (somewhat) new federated web search engine for medical and health materials that uses the semantic search technologies of WebLib.
From the About page:
"Our mission is to promote health and well being in the world by providing personally relevant information from trusted health sites on the Web. HealthMash™ is powered by the world's most sophisticated Health Knowledge Base that captures the expertise of medical professionals and people everywhere practicing the art of living and healing and the Wisdom of the Ages."
A broad search at HealthMash nicely shows methods for exploring related concepts, tests and treatments, and health concerns. The federated search across the health sites organizes results by topic (semantically determined), and shows boxes of different resource types - articles, books, images, news, video etc. As well, there are controls to limit the search to any of those sources. All of this creates a dashboard of tools for the searcher to explore and refine line of inquiry. I find it easy to use, and on my queries, the sources were "trusted".
Altsearchengines' medical librarian Hope Leman interviewed the CEO - Hope interviews HealthMash CEO Endre Jofoldi (Jan 23, 2009)
The interview reveals that HealthMash uses Pubmed/Medline and MayoClinic among others, and identifies the Health Knowledge Base as the distinguishing feature and advantage of HealthMash.
HealthMash was developed by WebLib, the same company who created the federated search engines, AllPlus and PolyMeta, both of which are very useful for general web searching.