Health Search Part III – OrganizedWisdom

July 28th, 2008 by Guest Author
Posted in Guest Authors, Verticals | 8 Comments »



OrganizedWisdom
The Human-Powered Health Search Engine

OrganizedWisdom is a human-powered, physician-guided search service for health. As a result of the explosion of user-generated content, and the ease with which anyone can now publish, Web content has exploded. The good news is people now have access to great health information.

The challenge, however, is the Web has become a vast wasteland of clutter, spam sites, and marketing content that is mixed in with all of the great information and resources.  Many of today’s search engines are having a difficult time filtering out the junk and delivering people the most useful results, especially when it comes to health information.

The mission at OrganizedWisdom is significant, but the goal is simple: to provide the best search service in the world for health by hand-crafting search results that physicians and consumers will recommend to their family and friends.

It shouldn’t be a time-consuming process to quickly find links to the very best resources when searching for health information. OrganizedWisdom solves this problem by adding the wisdom of trained expert search guides and physician reviewers to the power of algorithmic-only search tools and social bookmarking sites. This human-powered model helps deliver far superior health search results by eliminating search index spam from low-quality websites, links to duplicative libraries of licensed health content or potentially dangerous web sites.

So far OrganizedWisdom has created hand-crafted search results pages (called WisdomCards) on more than 10,000 of the most popular health topics, and the company which has more than hundreds of paid Health Guides, are working on the top 50,000.  The service is still in beta-phase but it is growing quickly.

How to use the OrganizedWisdom search service:
OrganizedWisdom is adding a service layer on top of its search results.  The company’s currently offers four main search services all designed to make it easier for people to get answers to their questions and the information they need:

1) WisdomCards™ – Search the WisdomCard Library which features more than 10,000 hand-crafted search results pages on the most popular health topics. Find WisdomCards on diseases, conditions, treatments, drugs, health products, doctors, hospitals, and even health companies. Each WisdomCard is created and managed by one of the company’s experts. The company is currently working to cover the top 50,000 health topics so chances are you will find a WisdomCard related to your topic, and in the instances when you do not get an exact match, the company provides results from Google, WebMD, Healthline, RightHealth, HealthVault, Healia, and PubMed so the user always gets a result.

 

2) RequestWisdom™ – Didn’t find what you were looking for right away? OrganizedWisdom offers a FREE service where an expert Health Guides will do the searching for you and create a WisdomCard on any health topic you request.  You’ll be emailed your own WisdomCard within 24 hours or less. This can be useful if you want a WisdomCard on your personal doctor, local hospital, or a rare condition that hasn’t yet been covered.

3) RecommendWisdom™ – Each WisdomCard is managed, updated and improved over time.  WisdomCards benefit from the Wisdom of Crowds because people recommend new resources that should be considered for inclusion on the search results.  Each link that is submitted gets reviewed to make sure that they meet specific quality standards.

4) LiveWisdom™ – This service makes it easy for anyone to connect LIVE via chat with board certified doctors, health professionals, and health advocates for a per minute charge, directly from a WisdomCard. This service makes it easy and affordable to ask doctors questions day or nite. The service, still in pilot beta, is private and anonymous and does not replace a doctor visit.

Anyone can use OrganizedWisdom for free.  You can search for WisdomCards, use the RequestWisdom service, or share your wisdom using the RecommendWisdom service.  Soon anyone will also be able to chat live with a health professional directly from a WisdomCard.

In addition to being able to search the WisdomCard Library from OrganizedWisdom.com, the company is syndicating its search service to hospitals, media companies, and health foundations.  WisdomCards are also easily found in major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Cuil comes out of Stealth – an Update

July 28th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Newcomers, News | 9 Comments »

Cuil writes in:

Cuil, a technology company pioneering a new approach to search, unveils its innovative search offering, which combines the biggest Web index with content-based relevance methods, results organized by ideas, and complete user privacy. Cuil (www.Cuil.com) has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than any other search engine.

Cuil (pronounced COOL) provides organized and relevant results based on Web page content analysis. The search engine goes beyond today’s search techniques of link analysis and traffic ranking to analyze the context of each page and the concepts behind each query. It then organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category. Cuil gives users a richer display of results and offers organizing features, such as tabs to clarify subjects, images to identify topics and search refining suggestions to help guide users to the results they seek.

“The Web continues to grow at a fantastic rate and other search engines are unable to keep up with it,” said Tom Costello, CEO and co-founder of Cuil. “Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user. In addition, Cuil presents searchers with content-based results, not just popular ones, providing different and more insightful answers that illustrate the vastness and the variety of the Web.”

Cuil’s technology was developed by a team with extensive history in search. The company is led by husband-and-wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson. Mr. Costello researched and developed search engines at Stanford University and IBM; Ms. Patterson is best known for her work at Google, where she was the architect of the company’s large search index and led a Web page ranking team. They refused to accept the limitations of current search technology and dedicated themselves to building a more comprehensive search engine. Together with former colleague Russell Power, they founded Cuil to give users the opportunity to explore the Internet more fully and discover its true potential.

“Since we met at Stanford, Tom and I have shared a vision of the ideal search engine,” said Anna Patterson, President and COO of Cuil. “Our team approaches search differently. By leveraging our expertise in search architecture and relevance methods, we’ve built a more efficient yet richer search engine from the ground up. The Internet has grown and we think it’s time search did, too.”

Cuil’s methods guarantee online privacy for searchers. Since the search engine ranks pages based on content instead of number of clicks, personal data collection is unnecessary, so personal search history is always private.

Summary of Cuil’s features:

•  Biggest Internet search engine – Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3X more than any other search engine

•  Organized results – Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category

•  Different results – Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page not its popularity

•  Complete privacy protection – Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories