Mednar the Health Search Solution

Mednar is a one-stop federated search engine designed for professional medical researchers to quickly access information from a multitude of credible sources. Researchers can take advantage of Mednar’s many tools to narrow their searches, drill down into topics and discover new information sources.

Mednar is here and it is good. Check it out medical librarians, public library staff, academic librarians who do life science searches, busy front-line clinicians, clinical researchers, medical school faculty, power searchers generally in the health sciences and anybody, indeed, who wants quick, authoritative results in health searching. – Hope Leman

Federated search is a new way to comprehensively search multiple databases in real time. Instead of crawling and indexing static content like Google or many metasearch engines, Mednar queries select, high quality databases to search simultaneously. While this may take a few seconds longer, it ensures a superior level results. This increases relevance and accuracy and reduces the risk of returning outdated articles and spam.

Click on the image below to view the online demonstration of Mednar.

Mednar uses search technology from Deep Web Technologies. Deep Web Technologies also provide the intuitive search functionality of World Wide Science.org Scitopia Science.gov and Biznar.

I really like this search engine, and although a little slower to return results than a generic Google search – the results are accurate and relevant. My favorite features are:

• Credible research sources – Great peer-reviewed sources
• Intuitive navigation tools – Topic clusters and sorting options allow the user to review returned results by date, author, publication, sources and keywords. I find the ability to ‘checkbox’ the articles I wish to view (automatically saved to ‘my selections’) as I scan through the returned results to be an immensely valuable tool.
• Individual source selection – The ability to select the specific sources to search
• Downloadable results – Email or download your selected results to a citation reader for easy reference offline.
• Five star ranking system – Ranking algorithm to find the best result for the search
• Automated Mednar alerts – Save your common search queries and have the results automatically emailed to you or view in an RSS reader.
• WIDGET design from DigiCMB - as in this blogs sidebar!

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