The Hindu Business Line : Medical search engine that promises to tide over data overdose

`JUST google it' seems to be the mantra today whenever anyone lacks information. Yet, its detractors say the search engine throws up more information than what one bargained for. For example, if you are searching for a cure for headache, you may be confronted with 26,100,000 hits to sift through.

This is what Hippocrates, a specialised medical search engine, is trying to overcome. Formulated by CloserLook Search Services Inc, a company with offices in Montreal, Canada, and Columbus, Ohio, the US, the application has just been made available to India through ChennaiOnline.com.

Ms Sumithra Jagannath, CEO, CloserLook, says, "Hippocrates is a medical search that turns the chaos of knowledge available on the Internet into a reliable source of information. When you search on the application, you will not get a list of Web sites that you will have to try out one by one. Instead all the information appears immediately, and from the most credible sources."

For instance, if you search for a medicine such as vioxx on Hippocrates, the results consist of an overview of what the drug is and what treatment it is used for, what precautions you should take when you administer it, what possible side effects it might have, and then a list of Web sites you can open for further information. Similarly, if you perform a search for a disease such as malaria, you get a definition of the disease, an FAQ, the causes, symptoms, treatment, and more information about the disease in a compartmentalised manner.

Says Ms Jagannath, "We provide the source for each of these, so that you can know that it comes from a credible source, and also you can go into that Web site if you want more information."

Hippocrates uses 15 renowned medical Web sites such as Medline Plus and NHSDirect Online as its source. She says, "We can load a hundred sites if we want, but we do not want the same problem to come up — that of too much information."

However, packaging of information is not Hippocrates' USP. Ms Jagannath says, "What conventional search engines don't look at is what is called the `invisible web'. It consists of pages that are part of the database that are behind most data driven sites." Examples of data-driven sites would be online shopping Web sites, yellow pages for any given area, and basically any Web site that requires the storage of data to be pulled out when the user wants it. She says, "CloserLook's products search multiple databases on the Internet, and therefore offer you a much more comprehensive search."

Mr L. Ravichandran, CEO, Chennaionline.com, says, "We thought a service such as Hippocrates should not only be available to users in the US (the medical search is also available on mamma.com, a US-based Web site), so we tied up with CloserLook to provide the service in India, and of course, also to increase the traffic on our Web site. Eventually, we also hope to make it a source of revenue."

Hippocrates on ChennaiOnline.com is a free search engine for one year, after which Mr Ravichandran plans to make it a subscription service. He says that ever since the service became operational on November 21, it has been accessed 34,000 times.

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