OK, now that I have your attention, I’d like to introduce the Quertle Blog.

You know Quertle (or at least should know us) as one of the most exciting advances in searching the life science and biomedical literature. My Mother said so. More importantly, The National Library of Medicine said so as well. We are pleased to announce, in our inaugural blog, that Quertle was a winner in the Innovative Uses of NLM Information challenge.

Vicki Burnett and I started Quertle with a vision to make literature search results more relevant. In our own research careers, we have been frustrated by biomedical searches that produced overwhelming lists of results, many of which were not useful. Quertle uses “relationship-based searching”, which simply means we look for relationships among your search terms as asserted by the authors – not simply the occurrence of the terms anywhere in the document.

In some ways, traditional keyword searching has become like the dragons of myth – representative of the primal forces (in this case, of search engines).  The keyword-based methods of all the major search engines were all we knew how to do well for so long. The result is the methods – and the sites – have become so ingrained, despite their “evil” ability to swamp us with irrelevant results.

In its short existence (coming up on two years), Quertle has gained users in 178 countries. We think that means the pains in traditional literature searches are felt everywhere. We also think that means Quertle is doing something right to address those pains.

In this new blog, we will, as time permits, we will discuss life science literature searching, life sciences in general, and on occasion rant about whatever is on our minds.  Thanks for joining us.

Happy Searching — Jeff Saffer