October 31, 2009
Allplus comes to NIH
This is exciting news - the National Institute of Health (NIH) Library in the US is using WebLib's search technology for federated search across collections and clustering through semantic analysis, and its HealthMash Medical Knowledge Base.
In beta, the NIH AllPlus Search Demo is at http://nihlibrarysearch.nih.gov/search/
You can
+ select sources: PubMed, NIH Library, or MedLine Plus.
+ search by keyword, title or author
+ explore related concepts on the search results page (assisted by the HealthMash Knowledge Base).
+ view results by topics (derived from analyzing the results)
+ view topics graphically - interactive map
+ view results by source
+ sort by relevance or by date
On the right is a panel of images - taken from Google images.
Counts of results from other sources are shown in a column. These include OCLC Worldcat, a number of NLM databases, and the general search engines - Ask, Google, Yahoo - (What, no Bing?) This will help searchers branch out but those links mean leaving the AllPlus sphere.
Endre Jofoldi of WebLib explained in a comment on the Altsearchengines post that, "it [the NIH Allplus demo] is based on our PolyMeta search anc clustering engine and uses our new HealthMash health knowledge base as well for the explore and discover section."
Compare the AllPlus demo to the NIH standard search, which uses a Google Search Appliance. Try it on cholesterol: compare results from the NIH Google powered search to those from the NIH AllPlus Search Demo.
The AllPlus version presents a dashboard of controls - it is information rich - from that panel the searcher learns about the topic and can start to refine. But the Google version is plain - there is nothing to help the searcher make sense of what is on the page.
References:
NIH Library launches Beta Search Engine for Open House, Altsearchengines (Oct 30)
NIH Library Begins Beta Test of Metasearch Tool, ResourceShelf (Oct 30)
Posted by Gwen at October 31, 2009 12:32 PM