• Illustration: Medstory Search Results

Medstory Inc., a privately held company that is building a search engine for medical information, will be acquired and its employees will join Microsoft's Health Solutions Group.

Medstory, which is based in Foster City, CA, launched a beta of its health-oriented search engine in July 2006. The search engine uses artificial intelligence algorithms to classify search results into subtopics that help visitors quickly narrow down their search results.

A search on the phrase "breast cancer," for example, returns not only a conventional list of Web results, but also categories such as "drugs," "nutrition," and "clinical studies," which are broken down further into common topics. The relevance of each topic is shown by a bar, and by clicking on the topic, a user can add it to a search or start a new search with that topic. (For an example of a Medstory search, see the illustration "Medstory Search Results".)

Currently, all results are determined by relevance—no sponsored results or other forms of advertising appear on the site. The company does work with some other partners, such as the Wall Street Journal and health-oriented Web sites, to give their content higher visibility.

The Medstory acquisition will feed into several Microsoft search and health initiatives. The current beta has a strong consumer focus, and the Medstory technology, which can be applied to topics other than health, could become part of Microsoft's general search technology. It also complements Microsoft's Connected Health Framework, intended to provide a Microsoft-based foundation for healthcare systems automation. Finally, Medstory's technology will help Microsoft respond to Google's efforts to develop specialized search engines. Google's Co-op portal lets individuals or organizations create specialized search engines by selecting sites and links that they consider to be particularly reliable or informative on a given subject. Searches are then restricted to those sites, increasing the relevance of the results.

The acquisition was announced by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at a Feb. 2007 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference. Financial terms were not disclosed. Medstory CEO Dr. Alain Rappaport will become general manager of health search in the Health Solutions Group, which reports to Peter Neupert, corporate vice president for health strategy.

Medstory's search engine can be seen at www.medstory.com.

Documents related to the Connected Health Framework can be found at solshare.net/files/folders/healthcare/default.aspx.