NIH cancer site gets faster search

The National Cancer Institute (NCI), one of the components of the US National Institutes of Health, has updated the search facility on its www.cancer.gov website to provide faster and easier access to information about cancer.

The site caters to a wide range of users - including patients, clinicians and researchers - who will now be able to access research-based oncological information, as well as research and funding information from across all the NCI websites.

The NCI has implemented Endeca's ProFind search facility to replace a legacy solution. Jim Baum, CEO of Endeca, said the main challenge faced by the NCI was meeting the very disparate needs of different users.

He said: "The types of information these different audiences were seeking vary greatly; what might be most relevant to one could be completely irrelevant to another, so one-size-fits-all relevancy ranking simply doesn't work."

ProFind allows site owners to fine-tune how relevancy is determined and to match how and when documents appear by seeing how users are asking for the information. For example, it will track which queries result in search abandonment and why.

The first phase of the implementation saw renewed search facilities deployed within two weeks of the contract being awarded. Search functionality will be enhanced further over the next few months and ProFind will be added to several other NCI properties.

In the UK, Endeca is expected to announce the implementation of ProFind on a major UK news media site this month.

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