About Healia

What is Healia?

Healia is the premier destination for trusted consumer health information and personal support. Healia provides a health search engine, an online health community, health news and tips, and consumer-friendly health information guides to help people access high quality and personalized health information. It serves as an independent, unbiased gateway to the highest quality health information resources.

The Healia health search engine was originally developed over many years under a Small Business Innovation Research 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.

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 highest quality and personally relevant search results. Our unique technology functions like a trusted health librarian who helps you wade through the maze of online health information to find the 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 and health websites?

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, 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. Our patent-pending search technology examines numerous characteristics of content that are related to the quality of health information so that you get the highest quality results. 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. Healia's "Personal Search" filters allow you to easily find 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 (this enables computers to "understand" what search terms mean and how they are related to other concepts) to guide your search. Using custom health vocabularies of hundreds of thousands of health-related concepts, related 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.
• In addition to a health search engine, Healia also provides doctor-reviewed health guides, health news articles, quiz games, and online health support groups that allow you to get personal support and advice from your peers and health professionals.

Healia strives to develop technologies that will help people live healthier and fulfilling lives. We are constantly improving our technology and ask for your help to make it even better. Please send us your feedback.