There are so many information portals on the web for health information, it can be tough to decipher which one is the best resource to answer a medical question. NetBase Solutions has launched healthBase, a powerful semantic search engine that aggregates medical content from millions of authoritative health sites including WebMD, Wikipedia, PubMed, and the Mayo Clinic’s health site.
HealthBase uses NetBase’s proprietary search intelligence technology to read sentences inside documents and linguistically understand the meaning of the content. Thus, healthBase’s search engine can automatically find treatments for any health condition or disease; the pros and cons of any treatment, medication and food, and more.
The search engine’s results are impressive. When you type in a search for the available treatments for diabetes, you are given results that are broken down by 63 drugs and medications used to treat the disease, 70 common treatments for diabetes, and 20 appropriate food and plants for the treatment of diabetes. You can also see the pros and cons of certain treatments. Search results appear disarmingly fast and will take you to the appropriate site where the content and information is hosted.
There’s no doubt that this is a useful site to tap into the vast variety of health information there is on the web, but I find the site to be slightly impersonal. Medical information, which can be daunting and sterile, is sometimes best served with a human touch on the web, especially when it comes to consumer knowledge. Medpedia is a good example of a site that contains a large amount of content that also has a social element.
But healthBase serves a valid purpose as an aggregator of medical content and will surely help those looking for a comprehensive research tool. Parent company NetBase won’t serve advertising on the site but monetizes its technology by powering internal search engines for companies that have large databases of content. Healthbase is a public demonstration of its technology.
Bing claims that it is the best out there when it comes to searching for info related to Health & Medicine. Is Healthbase even better ?
THIS WEBSITE IS A TOTAL FAIL
I tried to look up causes of AIDS
http://healthba...aids&Causes
It gives these as causes of AIDS:
* Jew
* Strong magnetic field
* Physiotherapy
WTF?!?!
This is racist technology and worse than Facebook’s holocaust deniers.
lol
try searching for pros and cons of AIDS
http://healthba.../#aids&Pros
Pros of AIDS
* Spanish civil war
* Achieve objective
* Achieve transformation
Huh?
I think if this is a showcase of their technologies, I’ll pass.
This is a silly comparison, AIDS&Pros
Any search engine would have problems with that query.
Look at the other good items.
I am not just saying be fair, you have 20 results and you pick on one.
How do the other ones rank?
wow you arent lying. that is actually there. total fail
hahahahhahahahhaa
This is an unfortunate example of homonymy, i.e. words that have different meanings.
The showcase was not configured to distinguish between the disease “AIDS” and the verb “aids” (as in aiding someone). If you click on the result “Jew” you see a sentence from a Wikipedia page about 7th Century history: “Hispano-Visigothic king Egica accuses the Jews of aiding the Muslims, and sentences all Jews to slavery. ” Although Wikipedia contains a lot of great health information it also contains non-health related information (like this one) that is hard to filter out.
I am sorry, but if you are purporting to be an intelligent search engine, you need to be show basic intelligence like being able to disambiguate from different meanings and tenses of words. You need to be able to identify parts of speech, especially if you are trying to find references to causes.
If this was just a regular search engine, people may overlook it … but this is people health you are talking about, where they need TRUSTED and RELIABLE information.
Having a result that says that Jews cause AIDS or that one of the benefits of AIDS is that it helps you achieve a personal transformation is just not acceptable, even with the excuse that aids is an ambiguous term.
For example, see how another recent so-called intelligent search engine Yauba handles an ambiguous term like Java
http://www.yaub...&target=all
and how Yauba handles Aids
http://www.yaub...&target=all
And Yauba is just 3 people based in India with no VC funding
+1
I agree
Obviously the 9M in funding went into management pockets instead of hiring competent developers.
Well put. An intelligent search engine, esp. using semantic technology, should be able to infer better than the search results cited in the previous comments, assuming those citations were accurate and unbiased.
You claim to be a semantic search technology. That response does more damage to your business than the actually output of your search.
Semantic search is supposed to provide more context based searching capabilities such that “aids” based on the context provide different meanings?
MedGoline Team
Jens’ comment drew some unfair criticism. The system went live with obvious flaws, but there are identifiable solutions. I advocated addressing these issues when I worked for the company in 2007 and there’s still no barrier to fixing those problems now:
http://nlpconfi...healthbase.html
roflol
Try going to Google and typing in “can i get aids from” and look what auto complete puts in there.
i tried to look for vertigo. it gives me U2 album Vertigo, the result comes from wikipedia. this is just a total fail.
HealthBase is equivalent to 3 Cuils.
This Engine is a Vaporware, a Scam or at best a Joke :
Try “Hemorrhoids”–> Cause of –> You get :
Joker
Related Searches:
Treatments for Joker
Complications of Joker
Batman: The Long Halloween
The comic also depicts Dent and Batman discovering mountains of cash and destroying it, while in the film it is the Joker who destroys a pile of the mob’s cash.
Source: Wikipedia, April 2009
Now you know why Batman walks in that strange way and is always of bad humor …. Joker gives him hemorrhoid !!! LOL
Any stupid search engine can search on Wikipedia …
Look at Pros&Cons for “Hemorrhoids” :
Apply electric current
Giovanni Aldini: from animal electricity to human brain stimulation.
Aldini used Volta’s bimetallic pile to apply electric current to dismembered bodies of animals and humans; these spectacular galvanic reanimation experiments made a strong and enduring impression on his contemporaries. .
Can’t Stop laughing…i need a doctor , LOL
I got the Joker sindrome…
This is just too funny
Try causes of farting
http://healthba...ting&Causes
Tuna???
I always knew that the #1 cause of insanity was masturbation!
http://healthba...nity&Causes
I wish TechCrunch would respond to the criticism of HealthBase.
Leena said…
HealthBase uses NetBase’s proprietary search intelligence technology to read sentences inside documents and linguistically understand the meaning of the content.
Perhaps Microsoft already developed it, without being aware of what healthbase is doing. Proprietary these days, doesn’t last long. Someone from somewhere out there would have been working on the same problem/algorithm without being aware that others are working or has developed the solution for the same problem.
It seems like many websites are sprouting up claiming they are the best health search engine. As a doctor search engine, I know the complexities involved in designing a truly user-friendly medical site.
Gotta love this…
And “as a doctor search engine”, you should really invest a little more effort in blatantly ripping off superior sites.
See your “For Doctors” section: http://www.mydo...r-directory.php
vs.
Doctor.com’s For Doctor’s section: http://www.doct....com/signup.php
Shameful… Did the “complexities involved in designing a truly user-friendly medical site” perhaps include going to http://www.doctor.com, copying the HTML, and changing a few words here and there?
this is real rubbish
OMG
ROFL!
Better than watching Saturday Night Live
Returns null for cancer related searches, how useful it is?
It does return some good information along with some lies that takes away all credibility.
Each post like this gets me closer and closer to abandoning the techcrunch blog completely. How does one use the word “Ultimate” for this product. Go check out http://www.righthealth.com, or webmd.com or even microsoft health, yahoo health, their experience is far better for basic queries like diabetes.
Check out http://www.righ.../topic/diabetes
Guys, please don’t take your readers for granted.
Because your RSS reader picks up a new headline, which will probably get you to come to the site, thereby cranking up their ad impressions, making them money, etc etc.
I dont even read it for seriousness anymore, just find some ideas that I can steal and make better.
Apparently Wikipedia is a medical authority now. I searched for “preexisting condition” and it suggested “coffee” as the treatment, linked from there.
Wow this is amazing how easy it is to scrounge up millions of dollars for any piece of crap these days.
I feel like any 2-3 people can come up with an idea put some crap together and get $5-10M. Is that really right? Venture capitalists write on their sites, “we expect THE ABSOLUTE best before we fund you,” but look around. So many failures..so many.
because most VC’s are fat old white men who dont know jack about technology.
“Parent company NetBase won’t serve advertising on the site but monetizes its technology by powering internal search engines for companies that have large databases of content.”
So basically, their business plan is centered around being acquired by Google or Bing? I don’t see them becoming a success any other way.
I like how death causes depression, lol. I agree with haha and Josh. Since I have developed a few lame sites any vc’s want to give me a few million?
toomanyproblems.com/blog
Looked up back pain. Cannabis is listed as one of the treatments. Delve deeper into the cannabis treatment, and this is what you get
Related Searches:
Pros and Cons of Cannabis
The President himself was rumored to use Cannabis for his back pain.
aids results bring up information on the visigoths. PROPRIETARY search indeed
How is it possible that such a search engine can make Techcrunch, while http://sciencerollsearch.com/ for example cannot?
Oops. Sorry, I replied to you below: “Berci, your site probably didn’t make it on TC because it’s a simple aggregator that doesn’t do any logic on the back-end. So it’s not really that interesting to TC, although I think I’ll be using it in the future, so thanks for posting the link.”
I just checked out the search capability and they really are bad. Can’t believe TC actually covered this. The claims were too bold and they are not even mediocre as far delivery is concerned.
People don’t take medication recommendation from sites. They take it from doctors, medical professionals and sometimes friends and family members. They actually validate it and then finally have doctors prescribed after all sorts of understanding that is gained from the social connections.
Really, the NetBase folks need to understand what their technology can and cannot do and then launch products.
I am not critical about what the site actually does, because based on the understanding of the underlying technology they use, the out put is correct, positioning and business marketing is completely flawed.
MedGoline will address some parts of the problem but it has a very different spin towards how and what it addresses. It does not make inaccurate claims of helping people find cure for their diabetes or AIDS but it helps people get closer to understanding their ailment, help connect real people who have gone them and know what can and cannot be done and finally encourages people to learn more about it so they can prepare themselves and build a healthy lifestyle for themselves.
Ofcourse we do not have millions of dollars from Sandhill commited for TC to care about it.
Nonetheless, it will be a very different company with a real solution to some of the existing issues we face it life related to health and shows us ways to better ourselves.
MedGoline Team
Didn’t you guys demo your own product before launching? How embarrassing. I wouldn’t want to be associated with this product.
Wow, I love it how everybody is so eager to pounce without giving the company benefit of the doubt. Yes, looks like they are not panacea to health search. But I would hesitate before screaming EPIC FAIL! Searching for something specific (HSV-1 – http://healthba...#HSV-1&Pros) does not yield irrelevant results. Having said that, treatments do not include Valtrex, which I found strange. But semantic analysis is a difficult problem and I would hesitate before dismissing this company.
To HealthBase: to redeem yourselves, I would suggest that you post some examples and explain what your value is.
Berci, your site probably didn’t make it on TC because it’s a simple aggregator that doesn’t do any logic on the back-end. So it’s not really that interesting to TC, although I think I’ll be using it in the future, so thanks for posting the link.
As for other self-promotion, guys, promotion is ok and posting a link to your company if it’s relevant is totally cool and appreciated (by me at least, not that I matter). But, just so you know, when you promote yourselves while ripping on someone else, you all just look like posers. No offense. And no, “they suck, check us out” is not constructive criticism.
Oops. Sorry. Reply to Berci moved to actually be a reply to his post.
On the netbase homepage the promotional video says, “Try a search for increasing bone strength” on a regular search engine. So I did that search on google and bing: http://bit.ly/agoJs , http://bit.ly/J9tFR. Results look pretty good to me.
This is an interesting article. I esp. liked your including how NetBase intends to position and monetize its service. New business models, beyond advertising, to pay for ‘free’ services are always very interesting. I quibble with your criticism that a ‘human touch’ would be better. Some people, like me, prefer information without too much packaging. I use other sources for the human touch, to get stroked and soothed.
This is a very amusing discussion.
Kindly take a look at http://www.searchmedica.com.
It’s not semantic, but the sources in the index have all been vetted by the best of human intelligence in this area: medical specialists.
You will not find misleading or inaccurate medical information on SearchMedica. Count on it. What you will find is what you need.
The Evidence-based Articles category is unique in medical search, providing only randomized trials, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses.
There’s no semantic syllogism, but there’s certainly human intelligence behind it, more than just software.
Please do check it out.
Thanks
(Disclosure: I’m content manager.)