Faceted search interfaces for metadata-rich datasets such as product information have been around for a while. e-Bay and Amazon are two obvious examples. Faceted search for textual data is only slowly making its way into the commercial realm (see NewsSift, for example) but have been receiving increasing attention in research. Villa et al. presented an interesting paper at SIGIR09 in which they compared different interface layouts for handling aspects, and compared the effectiveness of aspectual search with a conventional interface for different tasks.

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I just poked around and found an interesting Health search site that’s part of Microsoft Live. Although the blank landing page is a sharp blow to the senses coming from the nice Manatees currently inhabiting the Live Search page, once you enter a query, the interface is actually quite pleasant. I haven’t played with it for real, but it seems to populate some aspects (Conditions, Personal Health, Drugs & Substances, Alternative Medicine, and Nutrition, with others available through a link), organizes some featured content along with a set of links to medical sites, allows search results and searches to be saved, and shows some ads.

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