I have been rethinking Infovell. I initially looked at it from the privileged perspective of those, who like me, work in libraries and other electronic resource-rich environments. But today I am home sick and away from my plush informational environment. Thus situated I began to think, “Say, what I were an independent consultant, scholar or businessperson without ready access to library staff or research analysts or vast databases at my workplace and thus at my fingertips? What if I were a well-educated, proactive layperson with a dire need of the latest medical information—and had to do all my searching on my own in a limited timeframe?” In such scenarios (and these could apply to millions of people) then Infovell looks pretty good indeed.

I advise curious power searchers to sign up for the free 30-day trial here:

http://www.infovell.com/product_risk_free_trial.shtml

Like most search start-ups Infovell is still negotiating with publishers to list their materials. Now, if I were Elsevier or Springer, I would come begging to Infovell to list my articles. I know that as a result of my gig here at AltSearchEngines, I have bought at least one nearly $100 item from Elsevier (a special issue of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Clinics of North America) as a result of trying out search engines. Infovell’s clientele is an academic publisher’s dream demographic: a sophisticated, affluent audience that devours highly specialized information and that doesn’t think twice about subscribing to somewhat pricey Web services—or dropping several hundred bucks at a shot on academic journals or special reports of trade publishers.

What’s more, Infovell actually enables users to find what they are looking for quite easily thanks to some cool and impressive visual search tools.

And the “more like this” actually returns results that really are more like that—which is very unusual in search engines.

This is a step up from Google and Google Scholar. I really do think that lawyers, academics, high level managers and civil servants, independent researchers and scholars should sign up for a trial. You have nothing to lose and you might find Infovell just the tool to use in a hotel room the night before a key meeting in the morning. There don’t seem to be comparable products for the niche market of the unaffiliated brilliant or scientists who need a supplement to PubMed and the other tools of the National Library of Medicine.

This is one tool I will follow with keen interest.

I am writing this from my hotel room in the Marriot San Francisco.  I have checked in and now have my press pass as a staff writer for AltSearchEngines to cover the conference: Health 2.0: User-Generated Healthcare. This is a jam-packed event.  And I have to cover it with Microsoft Office 2007 (which is new to me) on a new laptop.  Your patience is therefore appreciated.  I was offered a free T-shirt.  This is a swanky hotel and I am little yokel.  I am going in search of food soon. I have never covered a conference as a reporter before. As I say, your patience is therefore appreciated.

The first speakers will be the conference organizers, Indu Subaiya, MD and Matthew Holt who will speak on The Future of Health 2.0. Then will come Mr. Techno Trends himself, Clay Shirky as the keynote speaker. His talk is entitled, Here Comes Health. Should be fun to hear in person a pundit one has only heretofore read about.
Missed the opening schmooze session. I do have to work in my other life in our medical library, after all and only just got here.

This conference is an ideal mix of info on consumer health sites and services, medical-related search and informatics. More and more that is the world of medical librarianship—and things anyone who will ever get sick will encounter at some point.

More later!