Kosmix will now become part of the newly established “@WalmartLabs.”

When it launched in 2006 Kosmix was building a better search engine that organized results by category and added numerous filters allowing users to drill down for more relevance and control.

Below is an early Kosmix search results page (via DailyTech):

When it became clear that Kosmix wasn’t viable as a general purpose search engine the company shifted its model — multiple times. The company evolved into a vertical search engine and then into a collection of structured content pages or homepages for topics.

Behind it all was a massive taxonomy (not unlike Pandora) that made connections between places, things, entities and products. Kosmix used its technology to assemble multimedia rich Wikipedia-like “topic pages”  for different queries or subjects. Below is an example for Las Vegas:

These local pages could have beaten Google Places to the punch but the company didn’t make a promised major push into local. Instead it found great success with a vertical site, RightHealth, which the founders say is “one of the top three health and medical information sites by global reach.”

The company also built personalized news service “MeeHive,” which was a bit ahead of its time and ultimately discontinued. Using the same technology Kosmix later created TweetBeat, “a real-time social media filter.”

Clearly the Kosmix technology is versatile and the founders creative. Walmart will use the technology (and founders) to develop social and mobile applications. Here’s what Walmart said in its release announcing the acquisition:

“We are expanding our capabilities in today’s rapidly growing social commerce environment,” said Eduardo Castro-Wright, Walmart’s vice chairman. “Social networking and mobile applications are increasingly becoming a part of our customers’ day-to-day lives globally, influencing how they think about shopping, both online and in retail stores. We are excited to have the Kosmix team join us to accelerate the development of our social and mobile commerce offerings.”

Here’s Kosmix co-founder Anand Rajaraman discussing how Kosmix will be implemented at Walmart in more detail:

Quite a few of us at Kosmix have backgrounds in ecommerce, having worked at companies such as Amazon.com and eBay. As we worked on the Social Genome platform, it became apparent to us that this platform could transform ecommerce by providing an unprecedented level of understanding about customers and products, going well beyond purchase data. The Social Genome enables us to take search, personalization and recommendations to the next level.

Although Microsoft might have been a more “logical” buyer, in the context of this history and the wide range of capabilities that Kosmix brings to the retailing giant — but e-commerce laggard — it makes a good deal of sense.

The most noteworthy — and possibly controversial — element of the new directory might be the inclusion of an Avvo Rating for each doctor listed. When Avvo’s attorney directory launched in 2007, many in the legal profession were critical of Avvo’s proprietary ratings system and some sued.

That, however, was more than three years ago, and there’s a chance today’s doctors may be more attuned to the availability of ratings and reviews online than lawyers were back then. There are numerous doctor directories available now (such as WebMD and Medicare.gov), some of which also offer ratings and reviews (such as HealthGrades, Vitals, and others).

The study, published in the July 2010 issue of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, examined the top ten search results on Google and Yahoo for ten common sports medicine diagnoses — phrases like “Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear,” “Rotator cuff tear,” and “Tennis elbow” — and analyzed the type of pages/sites that ranked highly and the accuracy/completeness of the information.

In terms of content, Dr. Karunakar says, nonprofit sites scored the highest, then academic sites (including medical journal sites), and then certain non-sales-oriented commercial sites (such as WebMD and eMedicine). The least accurate information sources were newspaper articles and personal web sites. Commercial sites with a financial interest in the diagnosis, such as those sponsored by companies selling a drug or treatment device, were very common but frequently incomplete.

“About 20 percent of the sites that turned up in the top ten results were sponsored sites,” Dr. Karunakar says. “These site owners are motivated to promote their product, so the information found there may be biased. We also found that these sites rarely mentioned the risks or complications associated with treatment as they are trying to represent their product in the best possible light.”

The study warns consumers and health professionals about relying on commercial health sites, except for the “most reputable sites” like WebMD and eMedicine.

The debate over accuracy and trustworthiness of health information found via search isn’t new. Microsoft has written about “cyberchondria” — how online health information sometimes makes us feel worse. Dilbert creator Scott Adams took a different stance in late 2008, writing about how Google helped him find treatment for a speech defect. There’s little doubt the debate will continue.

Google can do a lot of things, but a new study says it can’t estimate flu activity across the United States with a high degree of accuracy. A University of Washington study says Google Flu Trends is about 25% less accurate at estimating flu rates in the U.S. than the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) national flu monitoring programs.

Dr. David Ortiz, who led the university study, says search activity isn’t necessarily the best way to gauge the flu’s spread.

“Internet search behavior is likely different during anomalous seasons such as during 2003-4,” explained Dr. Ortiz. “We hypothesize that during periods of intense media interest or unexpected influenza activity such as the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, Google Flu Trends may be least accurate at estimating influenza activity.”

Google launched Flu Trends in late 2008. In its announcement, Google said that certain search queries are more common during flu season, “and we found that there’s a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week.” Google even suggested its flu trends tool is more valuable than the CDC’s data:

The CDC does a great job of surveying real doctors and patients to accurately track the flu, 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.

The study says the problem isn’t Google’s technology; it’s that flu-like illnesses are “actually caused by the influenza virus in only 20 percent to 70 percent of cases during the influenza season.” In other words, a lot of us think we have the flu and search Google accordingly … but quite often we don’t really have the flu.

Ultimately, the study says Google Flu Trends is a Good Thing, but the data should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt:

“Google Flu Trends influenza surveillance provides an excellent public health service, because it provides nationwide influenza activity data in a cheap and timely manner,” said Dr. Ortiz. “Nevertheless, our study demonstrates that its data should be interpreted with caution and that other surveillance systems more accurately reflect influenza activity in the United States.”

(hat tip: ResourceShelf)

Call ‘em what you want: strange, cool, unusual, bizarre, you name it. These aren’t your traditional search engines, that’s for sure. Here’s a list of 8 of what we think are the crazy-coolest search engines on the web. (Oh, and with a bonus entry at the end.)

1. Dead Cell Zones

Dead Cell Zones offers a searchable map mashup of user-reported dead cellular zones. It lists U.S. dead spots that have been reported by users of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and some smaller carriers. How many? The site claims to have more than 100,000 submissions from users. There’s also a UK version available at www.deadcellzones.com/uk.html.

2. Things You Saw in a Movie

Yep, it’s a search engine dedicated to the fine art of product placement. So, say you just finished watching the fantastic 2007 film The Kingdom and you really need to know what sunglasses Jamie Foxx wore during the movie, you’d go to Things You Saw in a Movie and type in either “Jamie Foxx” or “Kingdom” and you’ll quickly get your answer.

3. Storm Events

The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has an online database called Storm Events that lists all U.S. weather events going back to 1996, and some (like tornadoes, high winds, and hail) going back to the 1950s. You can search for records of dust storms, floods, funnel clouds, wild/forest fires, thunderstorms, and much more. After choosing a state, you can dig down to the county level (or not).

4. Pillbox

While we’re on the subject of government search engines, how about Pillbox from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. What is it? It’s a search engine for identifying unknown pills. For real! The site warns that it’s still in development and not intended for clinical use, and has all the requisite disclaimers … but it’s still one of the most interesting search engine ideas around. You provide the size, shape, color, and other attributes of a pill, and it returns a list of possible matches along with links for more information about the pill.

5. TypoBuddy

If you’re searching for bargains online, looking for misspelled auction items can be a great way to go. TypoBuddy is sort of a meta-search engine that makes it easy to find misspelled products on eBay and craigslist. Type “laptop” (spelled correctly) into TypeBuddy’s search box, and it provides links to look for common misspellings on those two sites. When clicking the eBay link, I’m taken to the results of an eBay search that includes misspellings like “lpatop, lapotp, laaptop, latop” and so forth. TypoBuddy not only helps you find potential bargains, but it also proves there are a lot of poor spellers out there.

6. Filler Item Finder

Amazon.com offers free shipping on orders of $25 or more. But what if you’re buying something that costs $24.77? Filler Item Finder to the rescue! It’s a search engine for low-cost Amazon products that you can filter by category, and the results are automatically sorted by lowest-priced items first. Paper clips for 27 cents? Sold.

7. StorageFront

StorageFront is a site that doubles as a marketing tool for storage facility owners, but on the consumer side it offers a search engine for finding self-storage locations across the U.S. You can filter results by unit size and a dozen features, such as climate control, 24-hour cameras, and more.

8. Soda Finder

Frankly, I’m not sure I’d actually drink a case of soda that was discontinued by the manufacturer 20 years ago … but expiration dates aside, Soda Finder is an online store that offers a search engine for rare, old, and discontinued soda pop. (They don’t have my favorite, Crystal Pepsi, right now — but it was there when I first discovered this site.) And yes, there are disclaimers and warnings all over the old products. But even if you don’t spend a dime, Soda Finder is a bottle full of fun.

So there you go — eight of the crazy-coolest search engines we could find. But you know, there’s one more I should mention. It’s similar to this last one, the soda search engine, but let’s not penalize it for similar/duplicate content. After all, if you’re reliving childhood by looking for an old favorite soda pop, you might decide some candy would be a perfect match. Chocolate usually doesn’t go well with soda, but I’m gonna include this one, anyway.

BONUS: Nostalgic Candy Nostalgic Candy does for chocolate/sweets what Soda Finder does for beverages. Remember Hot Dog Bubble Gum? Remember Mallo Cups? Remember those candy cigarette sticks? My, how times have changed since I was a kid. Again, buying or not, this is a fun search down memory lane.

(Special thanks to GP for some ideas and assistance.)

In the Healthline partnership, Yahoo! gains a technology partner that already provides over 90 million users a month with the most contextually relevant and clinically accurate health information available on the Internet and offers targeted opportunities for advertisers. Under the multi-dimensional agreement, Healthline will build upon Yahoo!’s existing high quality content to develop, manage and host an expanded Yahoo! Health channel that will be rolled out to consumers later this spring.

Here’s the search part:

Under the terms of the deal, Healthline’s proprietary semantic taxonomy – created by doctors and managed and continuously improved by Healthline’s medical informatics engineers – will be the underlying technology powering Yahoo! Health’s health specific search and navigation. Yahoo! Health will also feature Healthline’s clinical applications, including SymptomSearch™, TreatmentSearch™, and DocSearch™, a suite of interactive tools that empower consumers with a complete decision support platform for health.

Healthline does in fact have a superior health-specific search engine but also operates a health-related ad network, which Yahoo now becomes part of. This is a big win for Healthline. It should also help make Yahoo’s health vertical and, especially health-related search, better as well.

As I discussed when Yahoo decided to outsource much of its shopping site to PriceGrabber (following the big search outsource to Microsoft), a pattern seems to have emerged: bring in key partners to provide content and functionality in selected content areas and verticals. By contrast, Yahoo has been hiring and beefing up staffing in news, which suggests that certain “verticals” are more core than others.

We can now play the guessing game, which vertical will be next? I’ll guess that it’s going to be real estate.

When the locator loads, you many need to manually enter your location. Do so using the “Change Location” option:

After doing your search, a red needle icon shows where to get regular seasonal flu shots, a blue needle for the H1N1 vaccine or colored both ways if both are offered at a particular location (so many needles — don’t let your kids see this map before you go!):

Click on any of the icons, and you’ll be shown more information about that location:

A list along the left-hand side of the map also gives more details about a particular place and reflects all the locations on the map. Many of these are pharmacies, but Google says more locations will be added:

We’ve been working with HHS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state and local health agencies to gather information on flu vaccine locations across the country, particularly for the H1N1 flu vaccine (both the nasal-spray vaccine and the shot). At the moment we have data for locations of flu vaccine directly from 20 states and counting. We are also continuing to add information from chain pharmacies and other providers in all 50 states; today, you’ll find results from chains such as Walgreens, CVS and PDX participants, such as Kmart, Duane Reade, WinnDixie and Giant Eagle.

Unfortunately, you can’t tell at-a-glance if a particular location is out of stock on flu vaccine. For example, in the map above, you can see H1N1 is said to be available near Fountain Valley. But according to the list, it’s out of stock:

It would be nice if the map could also reflect the availability status. Plus, I wish there was a way to share a map tailored to a particular location. Even when you’re signed in to Google and using the My Maps feature, it doesn’t seem possible to save a map for a particular ZIP code. Using the share options also just shares the generic URL, not one that will bring up a location-specific map.

The locator will also soon be added the the Flu.gov site from the US government and the American Lung Association’s flu site.

Google also maintains a Google Flu Trends site designed to help you spot where flu activity may be peaking.

Tellefsen went to considerable lengths with me to back up the assertion, however. He said, “The closest thing we’ve seen is what Powerset was trying to do.” But he added that Powerset was essentially an elaborate proof of concept (subsequently acquired by Microsoft), while Netbase is a fully functioning search technology platform that is being used today by major publishers, enterprises and the US government.

To “come out” in a manner of speaking and demonstrate its capabilities to a broader public, Netbase has launched vertical search site HealthBase, a kind of “technology showcase” for the company’s “content intelligence” platform and semantic search capabilities. If HealthBase gets a positive response I was told perhaps the company will move into the consumer search business. But that’s not the main point of the site at the moment. Indeed there’s a very “enterprise-y” quality to the look and feel of HealthBase.

According to the press release that came out this morning:

One might look at this page and say “that’s just clustering.” And other companies have made similar claims about parsing and “understanding” content. But validation seems to come from Netbase customers. The company’s platform and technology have been in the market for several years (in various forms since 2004) and are being used today by P&G, the US Army, Reed Elsevier and others. To  independently test Netbase’s claims you’d have to systematically do lots of searches across a number of top health sites and compare results. However I was impressed with the material I saw and demonstration that I received.

The site, which was originally founded in 1999 but relaunched in late 2005, claims about 40 million uniques, directly or through its partner network. Today Healthline is announcing two new search tools for its site: treatment search and doctor search. From the press release:

While most treatment information online is embedded deep within articles on health websites, Healthline TreatmentSearch is the first online health application to surface a semantically-generated list of possible treatment options for a disease or condition. The application covers 4,500 treatments, including 1,200 medications and 3,300 medical, surgical and alternative therapies. Healthline Treatment Search results are ranked algorithmically, and sub-categorized into the following:

• Diagnostic Tests
• Medical Procedures
• Surgical Procedures
• Self Care
• Alternative Procedures
• Prescribed & Over-the-Counter Medications
• Nutritional Supplements

TreatmentSearch also offers the ability to estimate costs for the intended procedure by local market. In addition, it provides a range of alternative treatments and therapies to surgical procedures in many cases. Indeed, there’s a dizzying amount of available information on the site.

The second part of the announcement, DocSearch allows consumers to search for and compare doctors across a range of criteria:

Starting with only a health condition and a geographic location, Healthlilne DocSearch culls results from a database of 1.3 million health professionals, including MDs, chiropractors, nurses, clinicians, and alternative practitioners to find the right care in their area. For example, if a consumer searches on doctors who treat strep throat, Healthline will automatically surface a list of otolaryngologists as well as internists in the selected geographic location. Healthline DocSearch can be further refined by a doctor’s length of experience, languages spoken, education, hospital affiliation, and even letters in a last name. A unique doctor-compare feature opens a window that lets users compare up to 20 different doctors – as opposed to 3-5 on other doctor compare products — in an easy-to-read format.

The things that DocSearch won’t tell you (yet) unfortunately are whether the doctor takes your insurance and what past patients think of the doctor. But Healthline COO Dean Stephens told me that this content was on the roadmap.

Just a couple weeks ago, I reported on a Microsoft investigation of cyberchondria, when inaccurate medical information online makes actual health problems worse. On Friday, Dilbert cartoon creator Scott Adams shared a different point of view, telling blog readers how Google helped him find treatment for a speech defect known as Spasmodic Dysphonia.

More specifically, Adams was using Google Alerts to get information about the condition. Google notified him of an “obscure medical publication” that wrote about Spasmodic Dysphonia. He took the information to his own doctor, was referred from there to other doctors, and eventually had successful surgery to fix the voice defect.

“I never would have found that path without Google Alerts,” Adams writes.

But is his story representative of what typically happens when we use the Internet to search for medical information? The Microsoft paper released last month explained that using the Internet to diagnose health problems can make the problem worse than it really is:

“… the Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training, especially when Web search is employed as a diagnostic procedure. We use the term cyberchondria to refer to the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web.”

About 30% of people in the Microsoft study experience “heightened anxiety” because of what they learn online after doing a web search about medical conditions. But Adams says he’s used the Internet — “Dr. Google” as he calls it — “dozens of times to diagnose various minor medical problems, or to find out what things are dangerous or not.” And he poses some interesting questions about how well the Internet could diagnose non-emergency medical problems, both common and uncommon:

“With the uncommon problems, such as my spasmodic dysphonia, I have to wonder if Google (or WebMD, etc.) can do a better job than a doctor, if not now then maybe in the near future. If you could call up videos of people with identical symptoms, couldn’t you diagnose most of your own problems?

For example, are you any worse than your doctor at looking at High Definition pictures of a skin problem and comparing it to your own skin problem?

My guess is that the Internet could equal your doctor in diagnosing uncommon problems. WebMD for example asks a bunch of diagnostic questions and narrows down your symptoms just as a doctor would. That system will only improve over time.

Adams goes on to wonder about using an online database to handle prescriptions, with pharmacist oversight built-in. Something like that may already be included in government discussions of a national health database; I don’t follow the details enough to know for sure if it is or not.

Ultimately, it’s an interesting discussion. Adams’ concept of “Dr. Google” doesn’t seem too outlandish, but — to borrow a common medical analogy — four out of five doctors would probably disagree.