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I've talked in the past about the various possibilities of the future of search engines and the biggest threats to Google's dominance, and today I've been able to follow up on some of that prodding into that "vertical search fracturing" possibility.

iMedix is one of the more exciting vertical search engines on the market. Not only are they a recipient of the Best New Startup Award from the Crunchies, they're also very highly regarded in the marketplace by a lot of smart players. Not everyone's a fan, but they're in an area of high opportunity and have executed remarkably well from both a development and marketing perspective.
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The biggest "difference" that iMedix offers is the inclusion of a social network that integrates with the search results. Above, you can see I searched for allergies, and along the sidebar are people who share that interest and are interested and willing to talk about it. This takes advantage of some big psychological strengths in the health field - namely the need to "not be alone" when dealing with health issues. I'd imagine that iMedix's community is held together by stronger bonds than most, and that, potentially, gives them a powerful edge.

Last week, I got the opportunity to interview Iri Arimav and Amir Leitersdorf frrom iMedix (CMO & CEO, respectively) about they're progress to date and some of their search technology issues:

iMedix started because of a personal health need for both of us. Since we both love the Web, we saw it as an untapped resource for people looking to make better health related decisions. We felt that searching alone using the popular horizontal search engines was definitely not the right way to find and share health information. Not only were the results irrelevant in most cases, they also left us unaided and with a strong sense of anxiety. We knew that there was excellent information online, but it was organized poorly. At the same time, it was difficult for us to communicate easily and quickly with other people that had valuable personal health experiences and knowledge. We decided to build a health search engine that will be powered by the patients for the benefit of patients. We built a prototype that improved into an alpha version that upgraded to what you see today on iMedix.

From a vertical search perspective, do you see an ability to pull search traffic mindshare away from Google/Yahoo!/Live? Do you think people will ever come on the web and think - "I need to search for health/medical issues, so I'll use iMedix, not Google."? Or is your strategy more like WebMD - to build a portal and attract search traffic from the major engines?

We believe that the experience of finding and sharing health information on the Web is about to change dramatically. An exceptionally different and valuable experience can pull traffic mindshare away from traditional web properties. The experience iMedix offers to consumers is very different than Google/Yahoo or Live. People nowadays are attracted to communicating with each other and engaging in various ways. People want more than search and browse. The growth of social networks that took substantial traffic from traditional portals in the last 3 years is a good example. We are experimenting with an innovative marketing approach now and it looks very promising. We are continuously introducing new features that allow for the creation of valuable user generated health content and most importantly listen to the needs of our fast-growing community. We believe that if you create value and a worthy experience, the rest will follow.

It appears that iMedix crawls and indexes websites, just like the major search engines, but rather than indexing the entire web, you've limited your search to only domains pertaining to health. A few questions on that - do you hand select the domains to be included? If so, do you worry that the information is more narrow, or do you think searchers will feel confident knowing the results include more authoritative sources and fewer blogs, scrapers, etc.?

iMedix crawls a subset of the Web to index the most informative and relevant health articles available. Using our patented technology we crawl and index numerous Web directories and medical databases resulting in almost any known medical site in the English language. This way, we are able to cover all of the symptoms, conditions and treatments known to medicine.

In terms of building a search engine crawler, did you custom develop something yourself or use a technology like Nutch? Does iMedix maintain all those inverted-keyword databases or do you use third party technology? And, how many pages (approx.) do you have in your index?

Our crawler is a multi threaded, distributed computing technology that was developed in-house and is capable of crawling hundreds of Web sites in parallel. Our crawler relies on a high bandwidth network and while using a single database maintains an average rate of crawling half a million pages per hour without burdening on the crawled site's performance.

The crawler detects similarity between pages thus avoiding "over crawling" and is also capable of detecting frequency of change in a site's content so to optimize the crawl scheduling and gain maximum data update for each crawl session.

The indexer was developed in-house, while relying on open source projects for representing documents in a space vector model, we developed a grid computed application based on divide-and-conquer algorithms that provide the ability to index hundreds of documents per second into binary files that can be instantly searched while the indexing is continued in the background.

The number of documents in our index varies a lot since we are constantly increasing the number of sites crawled, while deleting pages that were flagged as irrelevant both automatically (by heuristics of the crawler or indexer) and also by manual processing that is done by our staff. In our recent versions we have used indexes of 10-20 million health pages depending on the factors stated above.

As a follow-up with regards to the ranking algorithm - is it something you've done in-house? Did you end up using a modified version of something like PageRank? TrustRank?

Our IP resides with our ranking algorithms that analyze the feedback received from our users in order to recognize patterns of useful pages. The ranking formula is constantly and automatically updated according to the users' feedback. The learning machine itself is built upon an ensemble of modern algorithms in the machine-learning field. The classifying algorithms are focused at bringing very high precision in predicting the probability of a page being a good match given a certain query. Our proprietary technology is also developed with the assistance of our chief scientist, Prof. Yuval Shahar who is the head of the Medical Informatics Research Center in Ben Gurion University and has more than 15 years of experience in the most advanced health information retrieval and artificial intelligence technologies. Prof. Shahar holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Medical information Sciences and is a certified medical doctor.

iMedix, in addition to being a search engine, leverages users to help build a community - what made you choose that path and how have your users been responding?

We decided to choose this path because we felt that people want to be empowered and can contribute so much from their experience and knowledge. If we build the right tools we can organize and leverage this collaborative effort. Although we regularly read Forrester, Jupiter Research, eMarketer and all the other major research companies we believe that listening to your users is the most important thing regarding building successful products. Our path is really a reflection of our conversations with our users. We are fortunate that our users like to use iMedix and that the Internet community decided that we are worthy of winning the Best New Startup of 2007 at the Crunchies worldwide competition.

iMedix has obviously been a hit in its first year, winning the Crunchies award for best new startup - with regard to publicizing the product, what have been your strategies to date and where have you seen the most success?

Thank you very much for your kind words. We feel very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. One of the strategies that worked well for us was to truly spend time learning and understanding the products that existed out there and get to know our audience. Not just read reports, but engage in an honest and an open discussion with bloggers, opinion leaders and patients. We were in contact with hundreds of these people and we learned together with them and with the help of our users what we needed to develop. I believe these people enjoyed the process and decided to share it with their friends and readers. This had a tremendous effect on our visibility and traffic.

Finally, with high expectations and a startup environment, I imagine things can get fairly overwhelming - how have you and the rest of the iMedix team done with work/life balance? Any recommendations you have for a startup - things you'd change or do differently the next time around?

The startup environment is indeed very demanding. The past year has been pretty tough for all of us. We’ve worked around the clock and had a hard time balancing our personal lives. Eventually, we are all happy and satisfied but several lessons were learned along the way.

We would recommend the following to every start-up CEO/founders:

• Have 1 day every week in which you do NOT check your emails.
• Understand that people are the most important resource in a start-up company. Make sure that they spend time with their families and encourage them to take vacations.
• Keep your employees informed in the company’s progress and activities. If you expect everyone to share the effort then you definitely need to share the fruits.
• And finally.... Celebrate! Even if you don’t have the time. Don’t let those wonderful moments pass you by.

Thanks, Iri & Amir - I'm not entirely sure I can live up to all of those suggestions, but will certainly try. Much appreciated!

BTW - Some interesting thoughts to consider for search marketers:

• How do you target content towards vertical search sites that could potentially be whitelisting domains?
• Are you currently seeing any significant search traffic from vertical engines outside the major properties?
• Is traffic from a site like iMedix potentially more or less valuable/focused to site owners?

My biggest concern is that marketers who don't pay attention to potential future landscapes may miss out on big opportunities to leapfrog the competition when those changes do occur.

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With a divorce rate of around 50% and many people not marrying until they are in their thirties, it is surprising to find that there are still many women who aren't financially educated. Most of this can be traced back to two factors: upbringing at home and society. In both cases, boys have often been given much more training and many more resources than girls have and the effects are damaging women financially today as they face a world in which they have to take care of monetary issues on their own but have never developed the skills to do so.

The Safe, Secure 1950's

In the 1950's most women quickly married and settled down to raise families. Very few of them worked outside the home, and finances were handled by the men. It was a financially prosperous time and women were expected to focus on the home and child-rearing. This focus on home-making was passed on to daughters while sons were groomed to the "breadwinners" of the family.

The obvious separation between girls and boys activities also managed to keep girls "sheltered" from financial concerns. They weren't expected to pay for anything on a date and parents didn't often expect them to hold down jobs. Boys, on the other hand, were expected to get a job at a young age, even if it was merely a paper route. The expectation was that a young man needed to "take on some responsibility" and "contribute."

As the generation raised in the 1950's grew up and raised families of their own, they passed on the financial biases that had been instilled in them to their own children. Many of today's parents have made the same mistakes their own mothers and fathers did, ignoring the obvious need for women to understand and learn to handle their own finances in favor of hoping that their daughters wouldn't have to face the harsh financial facts of life.

The belief that men would take care of women's financial needs was so ingrained that many of the "big picture" financial lessons were overlooked. Women tended to learn how to shop for bargains at the grocery store, stretch the budget at the holidays and that was about it. More complex lessons such as long-term investments, retirement planning and stock portfolio development were not a part of the picture.

Boys learned how to manage their money, save for a rainy day, and make smart investments and a host of other financial strategies.

Play and School Contribute to Gender Gap

Interestingly, boys more than girls tend to develop habits that are more geared toward understanding numbers and how they relate to finances from a very young age. While girls tend to be "collectors," says Joline Godfrey, founder of Independent Means, "boys develop informal economies based on relative value from the age of six on while trading cards and other items. By the time boys start trading stocks and bonds, it's just another form of the game." Independent Means is a company which promotes economic independence and growth for girls and women aged 14 to 24.

Even in school settings, boys are rewarded more consistently for being risk-takers, and investing is often perceived as a risky venture. Girls aren't encouraged to take risks and aren't rewarded for these types of behaviors and instead are likely to be cautioned to be careful. When faced with the prospect of learning about investing in the stock market or learning about retirement options, these same girls - now women - are more fearful of making decisions and less sure of themselves in making choices for themselves.

Statistics Show Gender Bias

A recent survey showed some startling discrepancies even today between teenage boys and girls and how much education they have received in the very basics of finance. Some of the findings include:

* Many more teenage boys than girls report understanding of how to write a check and how a credit card works, including accrued interest. * Teenage girls are much more likely to be in debt than boys, with almost 50% reporting credit card debt as opposed to less than a quarter of teen boys having any debt. * Girls are more likely to report that learning about investing is boring, while boys report a real interest in learning about it. When asked to elaborate, girls often pointed out that this wasn't something they would be doing in the future, while boys indicated that it was important to learn so that they could be successful.

The perception that girls shouldn't have to worry about their financial future in the long term (based upon the faulty premise that a man will take care of her or that she can hire a financial consultant to handle all of the boring stuff) is still present in many homes. Fortunately, the balance is beginning to shift as more parents realize that women who are successful in their careers must also be able to guide their own financial futures, not rely on others to do it for them.

Programs Aim at Closing the Gap

Today's girls are more likely to learn how to handle money at a young age. Cautionary tales in the news and on talk shows about women left destitute and the fear that social security can no longer support an individual in their golden years has, perhaps, contributed to this. After all, with most women outliving their spouses and more than half of women divorced, it's likely that today's girls will be supporting themselves in their retirement years - understanding Roth IRAs suddenly becomes very important.

Companies and organizations are also stepping to the forefront with programs designed to educate teens in general and girls in particular. Boys and Girls Clubs of America, in collaboration with Charles Schwab, offer Money Matters: Make It Count programs in cities across the country.

Visa works with Girl Scouts of the USA to provide two resources, the Cashin' In workbook and the Makin' Cents web game, to teach girls aged 13-17 financial responsibility. The web game specifically challenges players to find real-world solutions for characters' financial challenges.

With such programs increasingly popular and the need for women to understand finances now a hot topic, it's to be hoped that this generation of fathers will teach their daughters as much about finance as they teach their sons.

Carrie Carter: Author of: Think Your Way to Riches Kids' Style

For more information or to arrange an interview with Carrie Carter at 810.252.2281 e-mail: carrie114cr@aol.com or visit: www.ThinkYourWayToRichesKidsStyle.com

Carrie's passion is to help people on their inner journey to discover their personal road map for abundance, peace, and happiness. Her main passion is to give children worldwide the "Tools" which are lacking in the normal educational system and understanding to create the abundant lifestyle they are all worthy of. Experience Carrie's educational seminars, workshops, and private life coaching.

About the Author

Carrie's passion is to help people on their inner journey to discover their personal road map for abundance, peace, and happiness. Her main passion is to give children worldwide the "Tools" which are lacking in the normal educational system and understanding to create the abundant lifestyle they are all worthy of. Experience Carrie's educational seminars, workshops, and private life coaching.

Although many small businesses begin with only one or two members of staff - the founders - most growing businesses quickly recognise the need to create a larger team. Not only can this spread the workload but a well-selected team can bring in more energy, creativity, drive and knowledge than the founder alone might possess. A small, closely-knit, highly motivated team can be an unstoppable driving force.

The authors of The Beermat Entrepreneur call the members of this core team 'cornerstones'. They suggest that the ideal mix is one entrepreneur providing strong leadership, surrounded by four 'cornerstones' - one for sale, one for finance, one for product development and one for project delivery and customer service. In real terms, most small businesses cannot afford such a big team, and don't really need it to begin with. However, even bringing one other person in to the business can make a huge difference to its success during the first year or so.

In many cases, the original team will be composed of the founder, or founders, and one or two relatives or friends who have been roped in along the way. This works well if everyone is committed to the success of the business and prepared to work hard. As we've seen the early days of a business are defined by long hours and a painfully demanding workload - there is no room for the half-hearted or unenthusiastic. Not only will they not pull their weight, but they will sap everyone else's enthusiasm too.

I've heard it said 'never work with friends or relatives' and it's true that in some cases this leads to disaster. However, a team who like each other - and have a friendship beyond the business - can also be extremely efficient and powerful.

Jude, Business adviser

Remember that just because you enjoy spending time with someone socially it doesn't mean you will like working with them. Ask yourself what they would be like to work with. Are they hardworking? Enthusiastic? What do they have to offer your business? Try to find people whose skills compliment yours, who can bring something to the business that fills 'gaps'. For instance, if you are fantastic on the finances but weak on marketing, you need to find someone who can bring something extra to the marketing side of the business.

A recent London Business School survey of CEOs found that they considered the major factor that had contributed to the success of their businesses was 'selecting the right people with good attitudes who are loyal to the company and who want to excel in their careers'.

Defining Roles

Whether you decide to go into business with others as equals or you employ them as part of your original team, it is very important to define roles carefully. Everyone needs to know what is expected of them and where the boundaries of their 'area' lie. In businesses with two or more equal partners a lack of clarity about roles can be a major source of conflict, taking up valuable time that might be better spent focused on other aspects of the business. If you have a management team, you need to give them space to fulfil their roles and feel that their contribution is valued. This doesn't mean handing over control, final decisions will still rest with you (or if they don't you need to be clear about exactly who is the boss - only one person should take this position or squabbling and infighting can result).

Consider the following key roles and divide them between your core team. You should all be clear on who is going to take each role.

Business leader - who takes the final decisions? In other words, the boss.

Sales person - who sells to your customers? Identifies customers and carries out your customer research?

Finance person - who manages the money and the associated administrative work?

Supply management - who locates suppliers, negotiates with them and maintains adequate supply levels.

Core business - who does the core tasks of your business, by which we mean the things that your business is actually about? This might mean making a product, providing a service or something else.

Marketing and PR person - who promotes your business to potential customers and raises the profile of your business?

Some of these roles overlap, so good communication is also of key importance to your business.

Importance of Role Clarification

People do either one of two things in a business - they either add value or they add cost. There are no grey areas.

One of the most important ways to ensure that your core team members are all adding value is to help them clarify their roles.

There are a number of different aspects to role clarification:

Prescribed role - This is what the business uses to set down the individual's overall goals and objectives. It is usually called a 'job description' or something similar and it sets out the person's responsibilities, authority, and key tasks, as well as their position in the business hierarchy.

While this is a useful starting point, it does not take account of personal differences and changes in circumstances such as growth of the business or the need to cover weak performances by others.

Personalised role - the prescribed role is only part of the picture. These are factors internal to the individual which will affect the way he or she performs in the role.

This includes their abilities, skills and strengths, as well as their expectations of the role, their assumptions (about the role, the business, the sector. etc.), their values and ambitions.

Perceived role - the perceptions and expectations of others in the business will have an impact on the individual. For example, they will have their own views on what the priorities of the role should be as well as the boundaries: 'I don't think Sales Managers should...'; 'I expect you to...' These can limit or restrict the way a person performs, but if expectations are high and positive they can raise the person's game, enabling them to perform to their full potential within their current role.

From the Business Team at Learning Curve; offering a range of unique development programmes for small businesses.

About the Author

Director of Studies at Learning Curve Home Study, one of the UK's leading distance learning providers. Learning Curve offers home study courses in a range of subjects, including Business development courses.

If you’re a fan of 37signal’s Basecamp, you’ll probably like Cashboard, a new application designed to help service-oriented businesses manage estimates, invoices, timesheets and payments. It’s like a combination of SlimTimer for time tracking and Blinksale for invoicing mixed with some basic accounting. It also complements project management systems well. You could, for example, start off in Cashboard by sending a project estimate to a potential client. Then, once the project has been given the go, plan the project and communicate as you normally would in your project management application. While you work, track time, send out invoices, and keep an eye on company payments with Cashboard. And to make things even easier, Cashboard integrates Basecamp so you can sync projects, contacts, and tasks between both applications.

Cashboard has four main areas: Estimates, Projects, Timesheets, and Accounting. Let’s start things off in the estimates area. This is where you go when you need to send an estimate to a potential client for a project. Cashboard allows you to list each task for a project estimate, set with a hourly rate or flat fee, and send the estimate to your potential client. What’s also nice is the ability to add a best and worst case estimate for each task so the client has an idea of possible overhead. Cashboard then allows you to either have your client login to Cashboard’s client area and accept the agreement or let you print out the estimate and send it to your client.

(Note: figures in the screenshots are just test numbers)

The projects area is the main area of Cashboard and is where you will spend most of your time. Like the Estimates page, you can add and remove tasks and reorder as needed. You and your employees can also log time for a specific task in the task overview. Cashboard also made it very easy for you to keep on top of costs as you add time to tasks. A row will appear stating the billable hours and amount compared to the original estimates or planned hours, which is very helpful for service-oriented businesses. It’s also important to note that when you create your company, you fill in a default hourly rate, but the hourly rate for each employee can be changed on a per project basis in the details area of a project. Cashboard will spot the difference and show your clients the totals based on the company hourly rate while you can view totals based on the company rate and employee rate.

You and your employees can also log their time in the Timesheets area. I’ve tested many time tracking products and I must say Cashboard has done a pretty good job with it. What I like is that it doesn’t force you to track your time a certain way. You can submit time on a daily basis adding the hours you worked for the day manually or using their stopwatch counter. Or you can go into the weekly tab and fill in the amount of hours you worked each day of the week at the end of the week. You can also submit as you go in the “All-time” tab. Whichever way works best for your team, you can do. The only problem I have with the Timesheets page is that the stopwatch counter cuts off when you close the window (maybe adding a simple session when the counter starts would solve this).

The project page also allows you to create invoices from your company’s logged time. Just click, “Create Invoice,” and it will automatically grab the amount of hours each employee has worked and fill in the information for the invoice. You can also add your own items to the invoice manually so anything that wasn’t in the original task list can get invoiced. Cashboard also lets you change the invoice id, sales tax, date range, and add a small note to your invoice. When your invoice is good and ready, send it to your client with Cashboard, which will give your client a login to review it, or print it out to mail to your client. Once you receive the payment from your client, head to the invoice, click “Add Payment” and fill in the amount the client paid up. To close an invoice, just mark the invoice as “paid in full” when adding a payment.

Ok. You’ve created estimates, projects, and invoices. Now you’re ready to view the Accounting area. It’s no QuickBooks, but it covers recent invoices, recent payments, and provides helpful information about client balances and net profits. Perhaps my favorite section of the invoicing page is “Company Cash Stats” which shows totals each employee of your team has made and how much you received from invoices with the end net profit. The cash stats can also be found in an individual project page letting you see how much profit your company actually took in after paying your employees for time on a project. Another helpful section is “Account Balances” which lists each client with collected information on invoices and payments giving you a quick glance at who’s on top of payments and who’s not. My only complaint about the accounting section is that there doesn’t appear to be a way to export the data or print it out.

In all, Cashboard seems to be a helpful product for service-oriented businesses. It’s a well