Kosmix Health Search Goes Alpha

A new health topic search engine that will compete with Healthline and established sites like WebMD has launched as an early public test. The blog had this to say about Kosmix: Healtheon/WebMD, watch out: Today, Kosmix.com launches to provide healthcare search. I know two very smart search engineers there, Jason Zien (from IBM's WebFountain) and Ram Subbaroyan (from Inktomi). Kosmix is founded and funded by the Junglee/Cambrian nexus, and I expect them to kick some serious booty. Kosmix searches through a variety of medical related sites, from medical journals to blogs to research institutions. The site claims it can return authoritative results from hard-to-find sources. A search returns results in the expected manner, and delivers some grouping information in the left sidebar. Queries can be filtered from the left sidebar by information type, treatment type, or patient type. Running a query for Healthline is that it does include numerous doctor-reviewed information results for various conditions and topics. A Healthline search for topics with that info deliver a doctor-reviewed result as the first link in the search results. Right now, the sources used by Healthline, the anatomical images provided by A.D.A.M., and the various features Healthline has developed here