Healia is the premier consumer health search engine for finding high quality and personalized health information on the Web. It serves as an independent, unbiased gateway to the highest quality health information resources.

Searching for health information is much more complex and dependent on individual needs than searching for other types of information. Healia is optimized for health search by integrating cutting-edge technology including health "intelligence" to provide the best results for health queries.

The Healia health search engine was developed over a span of more than four years under a multiyear competitive Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award from the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, the focal point for health research in the United States.

Why should I use Healia?

Consumers are increasingly responsible for health-related decisions and are relying more than ever on the Web for health information. Unfortunately, general search engines provide good results for many general topic areas, but they often provide generic, unreliable, or "harmful" results for many health-related topics. This is especially true for searches on health topics that are commonly the subject of scams and questionable activities such as alternative medicine, nutrition, diet and weight loss, prescription drugs, and cures.

Healia's innovative technology ensures the highest quality and personally relevant search results. In an independent, blinded trial at a major university, physicians rated Healia significantly higher than Google™ and another health search engine in the overall quality of health search results.

Healia's unique technology functions like a trusted health librarian who helps you wade through the maze of online health information to find the exact nugget of reliable information that you need. Healia helps you save time, avoid unreliable information, and become more knowledgeable about your health.

How is Healia different from other search engines?

Healia is a significant advancement in health search engine technology. Healia's patent-pending technology consists of algorithms and methods for evaluating the quality of Web content, for categorizing Web pages and enabling personalized searching, for pushing targeted messages, and for seamlessly integrating search technology with any Web application. Healia is different than other search engines in the following ways:

• Healia consistently provides high quality search results. We ensure that you get the highest quality results by using our patent-pending Quality Index Score™, which examines numerous characteristics of content that are related to the quality of health information. With Healia, you won't be inundated with unreliable search results like on other search engines.
• Healia helps you find more personally relevant information. We employ advanced technology to analyze Web pages and categorize them according to specific target audiences, subtopics, and user preferences. With Healia's numerous "Personal Search" filters, you can easily identify the results that are most relevant to your individual needs and preferences.
• Healia helps you search more effectively and more efficiently. We use advanced semantic technology (technology enables computers to "understand" what search terms mean and how they are related to other concepts) to guide your search. Using health vocabularies of hundreds of thousands of health-related concepts, similar, more general, and more specific search terms and concepts are presented when appropriate. Healia also includes a health-optimized spellchecker and provides expanded equivalents of common medical abbreviations and acronyms.
• Healia is quick and easy to use. Because "one size does not fit all," we provide a choice of either a simpler interface without our filters or a standard interface with filtering options.

Healia is being released as a "beta" product. We are constantly refining and improving Healia and ask for your help to make it even better. Please send us feedback so we can provide you with the ultimate health search tool.

Healia was founded and is operated as a socially responsible company with the highest ethical standards. We strive to develop technologies that will help people live healthier and fulfilling lives.