Microsoft has agreed to acquire a company that operates a search engine for health information, one of the most popular search topics online.
Microsoft expects that the acquisition of privately held Medstory will improve its health-search offerings and anchor a “broader consumer health strategy,” the company said in a statement released Monday at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference in New Orleans.
Microsoft rival Google has tuned its Web search engine to recognize health-related queries and give users various options to refine their results by clicking on links for topics like treatment, tests, symptoms and causes.
About 113 million adults in the U.S., equivalent to 80 percent of U.S. Internet users, have searched for health information online, according to a Pew Internet & American Life Project study published in October 2006. People often seek information about diseases, treatments, diets, nutrition, fitness, medicines, doctors, hospitals and insurance, that study found.
About 8 million U.S. adults searched online for health information on a typical day in August of last year, which is about the same level of popularity online as topics like paying bills, reading blogs and looking up phone numbers or addresses, Pew found. More than two-thirds of people (66 percent) begin their health-related research at a search engine, while 27 percent start at a health Web site.
Monday’s statement didn’t say when the deal is expected to close, nor whether the company plans to integrate Medstory’s technology with Windows Live Search, Microsoft’s search engine. Microsoft didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.
Medstory, in Foster City, Calif., will become part of the recently created Health Solutions Group at Microsoft. Financial terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed.
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Microsoft decided to buy a health information search engine called Medstory. This is the company's first step towards an involvement in the health market. The software that Medstory develops involves artificial intelligence techniques which are applied to both medical and health information stored in medical journals, as well as government documents. No additional information on the Medstory purchase was disclosed.

According to Peter Neupert, vice president for health strategy at Microsoft, the acquisition of Medstory represents the first step in assembling technologies which can serve well for the consumer experience in health care.

In 2006 Microsoft bought Azyxxi, which is a clinical health care service system. It searches and displays information about the patient from many sources. The information might be provided by: scanned documents, X-rays and even ultrasound images.

Microsoft decided to make its move into the health care system at a time when many websites, that provide various information on health, started to significantly raise their traffic and receive investments. 

The industry analyst and Medstory investor, Esther Dyson, mentioned that the technology provided by Medstory is not just a search engine, it also represents an ontology engine. He also outlined the fact that Microsoft has acquired "some of the best deep technology" in the fast growing field of medical search engines.