Quertle: A Powerful, New Search Engine that Make Biomedical Literature Searches, Smarter, Easier and Less Time-Consuming
In 2009, I posted an article that described the salient and beneficial features of many of the biomedical search engines that had been developed for life scientists conducting laboratory research. While attending the Experimental Biology Meeting earlier this year I discovered a newly developed biomedical search engine called Quertle. After, watching Quertle in action, I was convinced that it was one of the best innovations to hit the life sciences field since the introduction of plasmid purification kits (yeah I know I am dating myself).
Unlike most of its competitors, Quertle uses semantic-driven text analytics to find conceptual relationships between documents—not just query terms scattered though out a document. For example, suppose you want to find information on diseases of aging. Your query "diseases of aging" on other sites might find an article where "disease" is in the first sentence and "aging" is in the last sentence, perhaps even in the references. Consequently, a large number of the results will be irrelevant. In contrast, Quertle’s smart relationship-based search finds and presents those documents where the author has asserted a relationship between "disease" and "aging", such as "disease associated with aging". This gives you the results that are truly relevant, with the important facts nicely highlighted (Try it). Then, Quertle takes it even further; its proprietary Power Terms™ and algorithms that automatically identify key concepts in the documents allow users to quickly conduct highly targeted, relevant literature searches and intuitive ways to explore them (Try this Power Term search and check out the list of diseases found).
Quertle’s powerful easy-to-use searching covers all of PubMed, an expanding collection of full-text articles (including BioMed Central and Open Access articles in PubMed Central), biomedical news, and even whitepapers and reports from different companies. The most recent Quertle software upgrade added TOXLINE and NIH RePORTER databases to it search repertoire.
Recognizing that access to full-text journal articles is of paramount importance to all literature searches, the latest version of Quertle now supports link resolver systems. By using Quertle’s new, displayed “My Library” link users can easily and seamlessly access their institutions’ library holdings. Recognition of individual users’ academic institution is accomplished by identifying user IP addresses (provided by the library) or through special Quertle links offered to the different libraries. Interested librarians can contact Quertle to get their institution added to the Quertle list.
Quertle’s developers are veterans of the life sciences field and understand the rigorous challenges facing laboratory researchers. Their goal was to make literature searching easier, more powerful and less time consuming. Check it out and let me know what YOU think!!!
Until next time.....
Good Luck and Good Searching!!!!!!!!!!
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The 
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Vincent Racaniello,
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My colleagues on the 
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