Surf the Internet these days and you’re likely to drown in a sea of information. New “better than search” engines like Bing, and Wolfram Alpha hope to provide users not just with content, but with the power to use that content to reliably answer questions and make decisions. Netbase, a Silicon Valley based startup is vying to be the new dominant aggregate information site. Their code is supposedly able to review millions of documents and actually understand what it is reading. To prove their point, Netbase established healthBase, a medical search engine that will scour the web to address your medical inquiries. As many users soon came to find out, however, healthBase is definitely still in beta. Check out the demonstration video and some of the screen shots to see some fun examples of how Netbase’s technology produces powerful and humorous results.

Even if healthBase is experiencing its birth pangs, the concept behind it is promising. There’s simply too much content on the web for anyone to understand on their own. Sifting through that content is a painstaking process rife with pitfalls. Searching for a recipe for lady finger cookies can get you a cookbook, a sex toy shop, a discussion of okra, or the homepage of a rock band. That’s fine if you’re just out to explore the Internet, but it can be horribly frustrating if you need an answer quickly about topics related to your health. Aggregating and filtering information is going to be a necessary tool as we start to explore the next generation of the web.

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