Healia

Healia [http://www.healia.com/] is a health vertical search engine and online health community. Healia's search engine uses algorithms to assess quality and to categorize Web documents. Healia Communities is comprised of online health support groups that enable people to share health experiences, connect with others, and ask questions of peers and health professionals. Healia, Inc. is located in Bellevue, Washington state, USA.

Quality Index Score and Personalization Algorithms

Healia use patent-pending Quality Index Score to judge the quality of search results.Healia uses algorithms to assess the content and audience focus of health Web pages and allows users to filter search results by those characteristics.

Management team

President & Founder: Thomas R. Eng (VMD, MPH) [ [http://www.snapforseniors.com/default.aspx?tabid=167 SNAPforSeniors - Advisory Board ] ] [ [http://sphcm.washington.edu/faculty/fac_bio.asp?url_ID=Eng_Thomas Thomas Eng - SPHCM Faculty Bio ] ] .

Thomas (Tom) Eng received a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Award from the National Institutes of Health(NIH) in 2001 to develop this website. The National Cancer Institute (part of the NIH) assisted with research and development, and Healia was incorporated in March 2005. It became available to the public in September 2006. [ [http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1852626 Healia ] ]

Healia was acquired by Meredith Corporation in June 2007.

Healia's CTO is Mike Schultz (PhD) who runs the technology development. [ [http://www.healia.com/healia/en/healia_management.jsp Healia - health search engine ] ] [ [http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2006/09/js_onlinethomps.html The Health Care Blog: TECH: Search engines revving up-Healia review ] ]

Drawbacks

The searching results are heavily US biased with many initial search results finding information from American web sites. [ [http://www.minervation.com/?o=1727 Minervation > News > Health Current Awareness ] ]

References

See also

* Medical literature retrieval

External links

* [http://www.healia.com/ Healia.com] Official website
* [http://blogs.mediapost.com/search_insider/?p=372 Searcher, Healia Thyself]
* [http://blog.softwareabstractions.com/the_software_abstractions/2006/12/a_conversation_.html A conversation with Tom Eng, Founder of Healia]