HealthBase is a ’semantic search engine’ for healthcare information that is driven by content mined from “millions of authoritative health sources” including WebMD, Wikipedia, PubMed, and Mayo Clinic’s health site. Techcrunch first described it as the ultimate medical content search engine but then had a follow up article reporting that HealthBase thinks you can get rid of jews with alcohol and salt. Language Log had some more fun exploring HealthBase.

We thought we’d see what HealthBase thought of the Semantic Web and it turns out that if you are experiencing the Semantic Web as a condition there are several recommended treatments.

and as a treatment itself, HealthBase is pretty positive.

Yong Yu and Rudi Studer are editing a special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on Semantic Search that will appear in the summer 2010. Papers are due 20 January 2010 and decisions will will be sent two months later. Relevant topics include:

• Information retrieval tasks on the Semantic Web
• Incentives and interaction paradigms for resource annotation
• Interaction paradigms for semantic search
• Semantic technologies for query interpretation, refinement and routing
• Modeling expressive resource descriptions
• natural language processing and information extractions for the acquisition of resource descriptions
• Scalable repositories and infrastructures for semantic search
• Crawling, storing and indexing of expressive resource descriptions
• fusion of semantic search results on the Semantic Web
• Algorithms for matching expressive queries and resource descriptions
• Algorithms and procedure to deal with vagueness, incompleteness and inconsistencies in semantic search
• Evaluation methodologies for semantic search
• Standard datasets and benchmarks for semantic search

See the full call for papers for more information.

Who’s got the best basic web search engine? One way to approach that question is to conduct an experiment in which subjects rank the results returned by several engines without knowing which is which.

BlindSearch is a simple and neat site that collects ‘objective’ opinions on search quality by showing query results from Google, Yahoo and Bing side by side without identifying which is which and inviting you to select the best.

“Type in a search query above, hit search then vote for the column which you believe best matches your query. The columns are randomised with every query.

The goal of this site is simple, we want to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines. How differently will you perceive the results?”

As of this writing there have been 1679 votes for preferred results with Google getting 39%, Bing 39% and Yahoo: 22%.

update 2:14pm edt 6/7: Google: 45%, Bing: 32%, Yahoo: 22% | 11,130 votes

How’s this for truth in advertising. The Chromium blog announces beta versions of Google Chrome for MAC OS X and Linus, but warns people not to try them in a post Danger: Mac and Linux builds available.

“In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software. How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things, you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.”

Of course, they know that this will make trying them irresistible to some of us. If that includes you, go get the Mac or Linux version.

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine is getting a lot of interest. Glenn McDonald posts about a nice side-by-side Bing vs Google comparator tat he developed. It makes it easy to compare how the two services do on a range of different types of searches. Here are the ones that Glen said he found useful in developing his initial opinion.

• kate bush covers
• president twice
• president obama's birthday
• thread query language
• where the rose is sown
• capital of estonia
• boston to asheville
• 36 jfk street
• austin population
• primitons reissue
• ellen barkin buckaroo banzai picture

I sense form some of these queries that he is probing the systems where an advanced search engine can exploit a little bit of semantic knowledge. For example, recognizing that a user’s query “boston to asheville” matches a common pattern “ to “, and she probably is interested in information about how to travel from the first location tot he second. It seems like Google has been working on adding more such patterns, at least for the low hanging fruit.

Of course, if everyone hits on this site it may get throttled or blocked by either or both of the search engines. @Glen — would you be willing to share your code?

(spotted on hacker news)

Google has had a special “flu trends” site up for many months that provides “up-to-date estimates of flu activity in the United States based on aggregated search queries.”

They have found that how many people search for flu-related topics is a leading indicator for reports on how many people actually have flu symptoms. They believe that this metric “may indicate flu activity up to two weeks ahead of traditional flu surveillance systems”. Click on the flash video below to see the relationship between the flu searches and flu symptoms.

So, is Google magic? The explanation for why changes in in the level of flu searches precedes changes in the level of flu symptoms is more mundane.

“So why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.”

You can get the details in a recent article in nature:

J. Ginsberg, M. Mohebbi, R. Patel, L. Brammer, M. Smolinski and L. Brilliant, Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data, Nature 457, 1012-1014 (19 February 2009).

Of course, such leading indicators may not correlate well if there is a “black swan” flu epidemic or even if there is an unfounded fear of one. Sometimes the crowds are wise, but often not. Remember when we all thought technology stocks real estate was a good thing to invest in?

The Google site also allows you to look at the data by state as well. Click on the image below to try it out.

Information on the Web comes in many forms, including text, images, services, data, games, and video. I’ve always considered text to be the essential type, possibly because it was the first, but also because so much of our Web experience has been shaped by search engines, which still operate mostly on text. But just as television and film dominate books and other forms of text in popular culture, maybe video-oriented modalities will become the preferred form of Web content.

Today’s New York Times has an article, At First, Funny Videos. Now, a Reference Tool, about how many search for information on YouTube first and turn to text search engines only when their YouTube results are inadequate.

“FACED with writing a school report on an Australian animal, Tyler Kennedy began where many students begin these days: by searching the Internet. But Tyler didn’t use Google or Yahoo. He searched for information about the platypus on YouTube.

“I found some videos that gave me pretty good information about how it mates, how it survives, what it eats,” Tyler said. Similarly, when Tyler gets stuck on one of his favorite games on the Wii, he searches YouTube for tips on how to move forward. And when he wants to explore the ins and outs of collecting Bakugan Battle Brawlers cards, which are linked to a Japanese anime television series, he goes to YouTube again.

While he favors YouTube for searches, he said he also turns to Google from time to time. “When they don’t have really good results on YouTube, then I use Google,” said Tyler, who is 9 and lives in Alameda. Calif.

The article reports that the number of YouTube searches now recently exceeded those on Yahoo, which had been number two.

“In November, Americans conducted nearly 2.8 billion searches on YouTube, about 200 million more than on Yahoo, according to comScore.”

You can see this trend in comScore’s December 2008 Search Engine Rankings report.

It’s hard to say where this is going. Video is great for some kinds of information (e.g, demonstrations, events) and less good for others (e.g., recipes, careful arguments). We can easily link information in text to related information, but can’t (yet) for videos. We can more easily write programs to process text and even extract semantic information from it.

But I have a feeling that nine year old Tyler Kennedy is a sign of things to come.

Rob Dubbin, a writer for “The Colbert Report”, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, Just Let Me Check One Last Thing…, on his attempt to last 24 hours without using any of Google’s services. The test was undertaken on the tenth anniversary of Google’s founding. It did not go well.

“I wish Google didn’t make me think of tentacles. It never did before I tried avoiding it for 24 hours — a doomed exercise that began as a challenge and morphed into a horror show.

This was supposed to be a birthday present to the Internet’s reigning brand — admittedly, an odd sort of gift for a company that so thrives on participation. Ten years ago today, on Sept. 7, 1998, Google was officially incorporated, beginning its historical march to ubiquity from a Silicon Valley garage. What better way to celebrate Google’s dominance — search, e-mail, chat, maps, news, calendars, Mars– than to abstain from its services entirely? ”

Remember when finding information on the Web was done by navigation using Gopher or Yahoo’s directory? I worked and we thought it was pretty good, at least until the search engines came along. Then we realized that search was much better than navigation for most tasks, especially as the size of the Web grew.

Recall how we get information from a big organization by phone today — we call customer service and navigate a confusing phone menu over the phone and after 10 minutes, end up being told to dial a different department. Dealing with such IVR (Interactive voice response) systems is part of the cost of living in our modern society. But maybe w can do better…

Fonolo offers a service that uses a search engine on their site to find the right spot on a company’s phone menu and connect you to it by a callback to your phone. You can even bookmark the point on the phone menu.

How do they do this? Here’s an explanation from IVR search: a ‘Google’ for phone menus?, a post on Telco2.0:

“And Fonolo wrote a web spider that visits large companies’ public phone numbers, and iterates through all the options on all the IVR menus from all the numbers, logging everything it finds. Then it’s just a matter of plotting it all on a directed graph, and making the whole thing searchable and available on the Web. And then the bit we like. You click on the bit you want to get through to, and their system uses the map to dial and navigate the IVRs for you, thus “deep dialing” the user directly to the point in the IVR they need. Every time someone dials through Fonolo, they use the interaction to re-validate that path through the IVR. The search terms that users submit tell them which companies they need to go spider.”

Fonolo is in a private beta mode, but you can sign up to be added to it on thei web site. You can see a video presentation of the idea and some ppt slides

Techcrunch writes in Cyberwar: China Declares War On Western Search Sites that someone in China is redirecting search engine access to Baidu, China’s top search engine.

“Further to our earlier story on visitors to Google Blogsearch being redirected to Baidu in China, new reports have surfaced that would indicate that China has unilaterally blocked all three major search engines in China and is redirecting all requests to Baidu. Digital Marketing Blog posts that all requests to Yahoo.com and sub-sites are being redirected to Baidu. Google Blogscoped forums indicate that Live.com is also being re-directed to Baidu, as well as confirming the Yahoo story and our earlier Google post. The re-direct would also appear to apply to YouTube.com.” (link)

Can any ebiquity readers in china confirm this? Is so, please leave a comment.