ResourceBlog Article: Netbase Debuts HealthBase Demo

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Wednesday, 2nd September 2009

Netbase Debuts HealthBase Demo

From the Article by Greg Sterling:

To “come out” in a manner of speaking and demonstrate its capabilities to a broader public, Netbase has launched vertical search site HealthBase, a kind of “technology showcase” for the company’s “content intelligence” platform and semantic search capabilities. If HealthBase gets a positive response I was told perhaps the company will move into the consumer search business. But that’s not the main point of the site at the moment. Indeed there’s a very “enterprise-y” quality to the look and feel of HealthBase.

To “come out” in a manner of speaking and demonstrate its capabilities to a broader public, Netbase has launched vertical search site HealthBase, a kind of “technology showcase” for the company’s “content intelligence” platform and semantic search capabilities. If HealthBase gets a positive response I was told perhaps the company will move into the consumer search business. But that’s not the main point of the site at the moment. Indeed there’s a very “enterprise-y” quality to the look and feel of HealthBase.

Access HealthBase

Continue Reading the Search Engine Land Article

Source: SEL

A Few Comments from Gary

1) First, a bit of a stickler.
Yes, it’s the first day for HealthBase (and things can change quickly) but it would be useful if the HealthBase would provide a complete list of the sources it’s crawling from. They have a small list on the first page of each section (and that’s a good start) but a complete list would be even more helpful to researchers. We do give kudos to HealthBase for providing a “source list” to show where the results come from. However, the kudos only go so far. Why? If you search for "causes of H1N1 (swine flu)," clicking the source list takes you to the source but makes you rerun the entire search again. Not very helpful.

2) One of the sources not listed on the first page but we did find in results from Wikipedia. We’ll keep the “is Wikipedia useful for health researchers” argument out of it for now. We did a search for “poor posture” in the “causes and conditions” tab. OK, no problem. We then selected “Joint.” The second result was from Wikipedia, dated April, 2009. One of Wikipedia’s strengths (and maybe a weakness in some cases) is it’s currency. It would be useful to let users know that this is (is it?) the most current version of the material available. When we found other Wikipedia material, they contained other dates. Here’s an example. We searched (using the “causes of conditions tab” for diabetes). Under the “infection” tab we found a Wikipedia result from May, 2009.

3) Finally, when searching for journal material (like what you find in PubMed) it takes some clicking around to find the full citation to the abstract (if available) and bibliographic information. HealthBase could and should make this easier. In fact, they could work with database vendors and document delivery services to provide full text access to the article.

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