A few months ago I wrote about Healia.com a health search engine: Here and Here I spoke with Tom Eng and Craig Husa about the thoughts behind the development of Healia.

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from Tom stating that they have worked out a number of the kinks in Beta and will be launching Healia to the public on Monday, September 18th.

Tom says that they have made several improvements in this latest version. They include:

  • We have enhanced the accuracy and performance of our filtering algorithms
  • We are offering additional filters to allow people to filter by the topic of the document when they submit a disease or drug-related search (Try searching on a disease and rug name to see how they are handled differently)
  • We provide a “Suggested Result” from a reference site for disease and drug-related searches
  • We detect and provide expanded equivalents to common medical abbreviations and acronyms (try searching on ACL or CVD for example)

Now I’ve used Healia a good bit since discovering it and have noticed a few good improvements since my last review.

  1. They have enhanced the color scheme a bit. The colored tabs and sidebars are visually helpful and the color choices are pleasant.
  2. They have added an “attributes” footer to each of the results. I find the reading level notations helpful. However, I’m not quite sure what some of the other notations (”privacy policy”, “For text browsers”) means.
  3. The tabs do help to well categorize the results. This will definitely cut some time off of researching.

However, I still wish that when you clicked on a result that it opened it up in a separate window. I have on several occaisions exited out of a window and had to go and search for the same topic again. I’m afraid this will eventually lead to people navigating away from Healia and opting out for using whatever search engine has been loaded in their toolbar.

Oh guys… do you have any plans for a Firefox Add-on? Boy that would be great and I would quit griping about opening results in a separate window.

Oh yeah… a whizzy Healia Search widget that can be added to blogs and small practice websites would be great too. I know it would get my Blogging Doc off my back as he asks me weekly about how he can add it to his blog.

Anyway, for those of you dropping by DIT– steer on over and give the new and improved Healia a spin.

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