New Search Tools Shelf
Kosmix Adds Two New Verticals: Travel and Politics
Yes, we like to cover the “vertical” or specialty search and database space. That’s nothing new. A few weeks ago, Kosmix, a specialty database that focuses on health information launched in beta. A couple of my health librarian pals are impressed with this new resource as a resource for consumer health info. It’s definitely worth a look. In the past few days Kosmix has launched two more specialty databases, one that focuses on travel information (a great idea) and the other on political information. Both Kosmix Travel and Kosmix Politics are in alpha mode.

A Few Minutes with Kosmix Health (Beta)
+ Databases consist of open web content. Not sure if it’s a Kosmix crawl or they are purchasing access to a portion of a large web database.
+ Here’s a Search for “Influenza,” results page consist of:
10 results (no way at this point to increase)
+ Spelling corrections (is this what you mean) listed.
+ Categories are listed in left margin (can a result be listed in more than one category?).
+ Selecting “Explore Kosmix categories” allows you to see on a single page the top three results in each category, neat idea.
+ Each category includes the number of results available. Clusty, FirstGovSearch and other sites also offer this info.
+ Since this is a massive undertaking in the early stages, it was not difficult to find material incorrectly categorized. For example, the Influenza Web Site from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and this page from the CDC were found in the “Journals” category. You’ll see that at the top of the results list is a direct link for the search in PubMed. Another example. In the “Fitness” category a speech by President Bush is listed. The speech talks about a flu pandemic. The word “fitness” is not mentioned in the speech.
+ All pages are cached locally. A timestamp when the material was cached is not provided. Since medical info is often time sensitive, this would be helpful.
+ Like many web engines, even the large ones, the page estimates are sometimes inaccurate. For example, 13 definitions are supposed to be included. When you go to the category only two are listed. When I click a link labeled, “To show you more relevant results, we omitted some extra results available. To see all results, you can perform this search with all results from all listed sites,” I still only get two results.
+ I searched for a non-health topic “Chicago Cubs” and found a few health-related mentions (player injuries, etc.) in two categories. However, I also found lots of non-health-related content like information about Wrigleyville, the neighborhood in Chicago where the Cubs play. Finally, the blogs category was also full of non-health-related material.
+ No syntax or advanced interface available (at this point)
+ “Adult” material is also available if the right (non-technical) terms are entered.
+ Since this is a subject-focused database, some info about what sources they do and do not use would be useful (aka selection policy). Also, gloss for each category would be helpful. Are URLs/sites assigned to a specific category? What makes a blog ok for inclusion in the blog category.

Overall, not a bad start. It needs work, but Kosmix is worthy of attention as a source for consumer health info. At this moment, more sophisticated searchers (in terms of content) might find the two sources listed below of greater value. We do think the travel search specialty database is a great idea. Let’s see how that goes. ResourceShelf will be watching Kosmix closely.
–
–
Other Tools that Cluster Health and Biomedical Information
+ ClusterMed from Vivisimo
This service dynamically clusters (in real time) the first 100 results from a PubMed search. Note that because of the quality metadata associated with each entry, it’s possible to cluster the results several different ways (abstract/title/MESH, author, etc.) Registering for ClusterMed (free for one month) offers the ability to cluster 500 results. The fee-based version of ClusterMed will cluster up to 5000 results.
—
—
+ BioMeta Cluster
This service also from Vivisimo (free) runs a live meta/federated search across a wide variety of biomedical and news databases. Results are then dynamically clustered. Vivisimo’s live page preview feature is also available (look for the preview link next to each result title). Users can select which databases they do or do not want included in the search. Addditional features include exporting results (various formats), e-mail results, alerts, and the ability to cluster more data. We plan to take a closer look at this service in the future.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2006 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.