ResearchBuzz

There seems to be a resurgence of interest in niche search engines, though the subject of health is admittedly a pretty darn big niche. If you’re looking for health information on the Web, I admit I was pretty impressed with Healia ( http://www.healia.com ). (Healia’s in beta.)

The first thing I do with any of specialized search engine — especially one that indexes information that users might find critical — is try to break it. (Sorry.) The first query that came to mind for this particular search engine was canadian drugs. Run that search on Google and look at the kind of results you get — the query is a good magnet for splogs and e-commerce sites.

I was expecting at least a little of that in the Healia results but I didn’t see it! The query managed to find almost 1.9 million results (well over twice what the Google search for the same query found) but the first page of results were rock solid, including content from government sites (state and federal) Yahoo Health, and Dr. Koop. Going through several pages of results the only complaint I have is that one particular story (about the FDA’s announcement that “Canadian” drugs actually come from other countries) is repeated over and over and over.

Backing up I did a more pedantic search for methadone, which is currently in the news as the subject of an FDA warning. Healia produced a good set of about 12,000 results (this time Google clobbered them with over 4 million and a pretty good first page of results.) You might also notice that Healia’s results come in tabs; in addition to all search results you can get tabs of results on dosage, usage, and side effects.

In addition to plain search results Healia has a bunch of other features. With each search it’ll make suggestions (for both more specific and more general) and if you’re searching for drugs it’ll take a guess at an appropriate Medline entry. Also, if you check out the left side of the results page, you’ll see several checkbox-filters you can use to narrow down your results by reading complexity, relevant population, and characteristics (interactive tools, for text browsers, fast-loading, etc.) I didn’t trust the reading complexity filter that much. It brought me some slightly murky-to-the-layman NIH pages when I searched for synthroid.

Other than that, though, I was very impressed with this site. From the experiments I ran I found it a great place for basic health-related searches that provides a nice mix of results, combining consumer-level, government,and forum sites. Take a look!

Last February I covered a service called Feed43, which allows you to create regular expression scrapes of a given Web page and save the output to an RSS feed. The URL of the site is http://feed43.com/, but the site calls itself Feed for Free. Unfortunately it isn’t.

I had noticed for several days the little example feed I had made (counting the number of subscribers my feed had in Bloglines) wasn’t functioning. I figured it was my browser, or the regular expression I used to scrape the number didn’t work anymore. When I got around to visiting Feed for Free, though, I saw this:

“Due to high load, service is currently limited to serve only paid users. We are working hard to overcome this.”

So right now the service is Feed for Paid. Which is fine, only I wish I’d seen an e-mail alerting me to that fact. Feed 43’s blog has an explanation for the outage and additional information. The free services are not expected to be back for 3-4 weeks.

It’s still a great idea; I found it surprising how easy it was to use. Check out the upgrade pricing — the lowest paid-level account, which offers 20 paid feeds, is $29 a year.

Those of you who liked the idea of cyclic RSS feeds might be interested in Podiobooks, which offers free episode-based podcast feeds of audio books. Currently over 75 free titles are available at the site ( http://www.podiobooks.com/index.php ).

There are 80 titles here, which are spread out over 1700 episodes. Everything’s free, though the authors will happily accept donations. Though there are some public domain titles here, there are also many original works. Note that while some of these books are finished, some of them are still in progress, with new chapters, or episodes, are released periodically.

A drop-down menu allows you to browse by genre, from business to historical fiction to science fiction and young adult. I took a look at a fantasy called In the Service of Samurai. An audiobook’s page has information about the book, a link to buy from Amazon, a place you can donate, and of course information about the book as was as a list of available episodes (this book is one of the ones in progress, with 31 chapters available.) Reviews of various aspects of the book (audio quality, narration quality, writing quality, etc.) are also available.

There’s a button you can click to hear the first chapter. The ones I listened to were not sparkling perfect as far as audio quality is concerned, but they weren’t bad, certainly listenable. (And besides, they ARE free.)

If you want to listen to the entire book, or as much as is available, you’ll have to register (which is free.) Once you’ve registered you can set up a schedule to receive podcasts of chapters from the beginning of a book, whether it be daily, weekly, or monthly.

There’s an interesting mix of original content here, though I’d be reluctant to get all into a book that wasn’t finished yet — I can imagine waiting breathlessly for the next chapter only to find out it wouldn’t be available for several weeks. At first blush 80 doesn’t seem like many, but seriously, how long would it take you to read 80 books? If you’re interested in getting more information about Podiobooks, the site has both a FAQ and submission guidelines.