Biomedical IT/text-mining company Bioalma, Spain, has reportedly launched a free search tool called novo|seek for the PubMed literature database. The company claims that the new tool provides intelligent search functionalities to help life scientists guide and refine their searches of biomedical literature.
novo|seek is projected as a 'dynamic information extraction system' for searching biomedical records in repositories, particularly PubMed. The tool indexes the biomedical literature in PubMed and enables researchers to find relevant results efficiently by using external sources of data and contextual term information. It provides familiar chronological listings of search results, but a sidebar presents a series of additional related terms based on relevancy, allowing researchers to drill down and refine additional queries.
Bioalma downloads and indexes 18 million documents in Medline each day. That information is then put into the company's own database using the open-source Lucene search engine library. While the company believes that novo|seek will help introduce its other products to a broader audience, it also hopes to generate revenue by selling online advertising through Google ads, targeting companies selling reagents or equipment.
The first release of novo|seek focuses on PubMed, but in time Bioalma plans to integrate additional resources, such as grant information and full-text search.
