Health Search Engine Purchased

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.