Healia

Healia 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 composed 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, 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).^[1]^[2]

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.^[3]

Healia was acquired by Meredith Corporation in June 2007.

Healia's CTO is Mike Schultz (PhD) who runs the technology development.^[4]^[5]

AMSA Partnership

In 2009, Healia partnered with the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) to provide medical students an opportunity to answer health questions posed in Healia Communities alongside licensed professionals.

Drawbacks

The searching results are heavily US biased with many initial search results finding information from American web sites.^[6]

References

^ "SNAPforSeniors - Advisory Board". Archived from the original on 2007-09-28. Retrieved 2007-06-04.
^ "Thomas Eng - SPHCM Faculty Bio". Archived from the original on 2006-08-28. Retrieved 2007-06-04.
^ Healia
^ Healia - health search engine
^ "The Health Care Blog: TECH: Search engines revving up-Healia review". Archived from the original on 2007-05-09. Retrieved 2007-06-04.
^ Minervation > News > Health Current Awareness

External links

Healia.com Official website
Searcher, Healia Thyself
A conversation with Tom Eng, Founder of Healia

[1] "SNAPforSeniors - Advisory Board". Archived from the original on 2007-09-28. Retrieved 2007-06-04.

[2] "Thomas Eng - SPHCM Faculty Bio". Archived from the original on 2006-08-28. Retrieved 2007-06-04.

[3] Healia

[4] Healia - health search engine

[5] "The Health Care Blog: TECH: Search engines revving up-Healia review". Archived from the original on 2007-05-09. Retrieved 2007-06-04.

[6] Minervation > News > Health Current Awareness

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