AltSearchEngines’ writer and medical librarian Hope Leman interviews Endre Jofoldi, CEO of WebLib Ltd, developers of HealthMash.

Who is the target audience for HealthMash? Physicians or consumers?
Primarily consumers, but physicians will also find useful information in HealthMash

Your Web site says, “HealthMash™ will open on the World Wide Web in 2008.” Did it? If not, why not? (It now says 2009 -ed.)
The development of the Health Knowledge Base poses a lot of challenges and we have not completed the project to our satisfaction in 2008. We strive for quality rather than hasty deployment. And we already modified the site to reflect this change.

What do you mean by, “HealthMash is powered by the world’s most sophisticated Health Knowledge Base?” Is it better than PubMed/Medline?
PubMed/Medline is an excellent biomedical literature database. Our Health Knowledge Base stores explicit knowledge about health conditions, causes, treatments and procedures etc.

How does it differ from SearchMedica?
SearchMedica is a good vertical health search engine but it does not have a Health Knowledge Base to help users focus on important facets of a health topic, e.g. specific drugs and/or supplements used to treat a disease or condition like sciatica.

And Mednar?
Mednar is first and foremost a health metasearch engine, and it does not have its own health knowledge base  either.

And MedlinePlus?
Medlineplus is an outstanding collection of well organized health information for consumers. In fact HealthMash uses Medlineplus as one of the most trusted sources in HealthMash

And ScienceRoll? What is your relation with ScienceRoll?
ScienceRoll is based on our advanced PolyMeta Meta-Search and Discovery Engine  (More information about PolyMeta can be found here. Another example of our engine is AllPlus). Bertalan Mesko, the author of  ScienceRoll Medical Blog is a friend of ours, and we provided this search engine for him as a showcase. We can implement any kind of federated search engine for prospective customers.

How do you plan to make money? What is your revenue model?
Our revenue model includes advertising as well as special partnerships and relationships with health care industry players.

You refer to “trusted health sites on the Web.” Such as?
Medlineplus, Mayo Clinic, and many others.

Will you feature email alerting of saved searches, as Mednar does?
At a later date yes, but right now our focus is on developing the health knowledge base and a next generation knowledge driven consumer health search technology.

What is your own personal background? Are you a physician or an engineer?
I am a software engineer, and I have been working on health related search and discovery applications with my colleagues for more than 5 years now. Our team also includes medical experts, computer scientists, knowledge engineers and computational linguists.

Why would I as a consumer or medical professional want to use HealthMash? What makes it better?
Consumers and medical professionals need reliable, up-to-date, well organized and actionable health information, which is what HealthMash will offer.

Is HealthMash going to be freely available on the Web and advertising supported or will it be an enterprise search tool for large health organizations to feature on their Web sites? Will it be more like MyDailyApple or Mednar? Are you going to try to market it to large consumer health sites as MyDailyApple does with RightHealth, for instance?
HealthMash will be freely available on the Web.  It will also be an enterprise search tool for large health organizations to feature on their Web sites via the HealthMash and Health Knowledge Base APIs.  HealthMash will differ from both MyDailyApple and Mednar, because it will be based on this custom health knowledge base which will be a huge help in organizing the retrieved data.  We hope that large consumer health sites will also be interested in licensing our technology

How does it compare with DeepDyve?
We are not intimately familiar with DeepDyve, however as far as I can see, they are aiming mostly for scientists as their customers. Our product is going to be useful for everyday health searchers as well.

What is your funding and what are your plans for 2009?
We have not sought and have not receive any outside funding yet.
Our plan is to release the public beta version of HealthMash and showcase it at the Medical Library Association conference in May 2009.

Are you pilot testing it now? If so, where?
We are pilot testing HealthMash internally and with special potential customers

What need will it address that is not being met by your competitors?
Medical Knowledge. Most current generation systems tap into good health content using “keyword wizardry”.  HealthMash aims to utilize its proprietary Health Knowledge Base to retrieve and display useful and well organized health information rather than just text snippets.

Will you feature RSS feeds?
Not initially

Will users be able to search for podcasts, PowerPoint presentations and PDFS by file format and year?
No.

Do you have agreements with big scitech publishers like Elsevier to feature their content?
Not yet.  Elsevier is a good example of a potential partner in the consumer health space.