Monday, May 21, 2007

Yottalook Anatomy

With the new upgrade, we moved the Yottalook Anatomy to the main engine after many revisions and updates. We have found that many users look for anatomy-related information online, but the information they are looking for usually are not contained in the first set of results returned due to various reasons. For the anatomy engine, we have focused on atlas-type of content. We also included various journal articles that contain anatomy-related information.

You can access this engine by clicking on "Anatomy" on top of the search box.

With the new version, we have also added feature to automatically detect when a user is searching for anatomy and specifically filter out results so that they appear similar to the dedicated anatomy engine even when the user is searching for information on the main "Web" engine. This is just one of many new algorithms we have implemented to better understand the incoming query and tailor the results displayed accordingly.

We always welcome feedback, so please feel free to contact us with any suggestions.

New Yottalook!

Last night, we upgraded our Yottalook to a new version. We have been in development for the past several months, working to add various features which we hope typical users of Yottalook would find useful. I will try to outline some of the new features in this blog and expand on each new feature in my upcoming blog entries.

When you first get to the main Yottalook page, you will notice various "tips" on the bottom. These briefly demonstrate some of the new features that have been added. They also contain links that you can click on, which will give live demonstration of the described feature.

We added a new feature called, "Related Terms". Now, when you type in a word and if it has 'related terms', such as synonyms, those will also be displayed in a little blue box. This will give you options to select different related terms. This feature also allows more relevant results to be displayed. Try terms like "abdominal angina" and "phakomatosis".

Time to time, you will see "Yottalook Link" or Yottalink for short. They provide what we considered high yield content or links to content which you may find useful. They are not ads but rather short-cuts, if you will, to specific contents. To see an example, type in, "pulmonary nodule". You will notice that it will not simply take you to the Radiology article on Fleischner Society's guideline on solitary pulmonary nodules less than 8 mm detected incidentally on nonscreening CT, but it will actually take you directly to the table that contains all this recommendation, giving you instant access wherever you have internet access. Try also, "knee mri anatomy" and see what Yottalook Link you're given.

Because we continue to use Google's backend, you will continue to get their "Did you mean" feature which corrects for any misspellings and provides users with possible alternative suggestion/correct spelling. We have found, however, that this feature is not tailored for the medical professionals. As a result, we have added our own "Did you mean" option. Try typing in "PE" for example and you will see three different options which are all medical terms. You can always tell when we're providing you with alternative suggestions by looking for "(powered by Yottalook)".

I will describe more new features in my next blog.