

Show HN: (Our startup) DistilBio, a search engine for life sciences data - pramodbiligiri

Link: http://www.distilbio.com<p>DistilBio lets you look up detailed information on drugs, diseases, proteins etc. You can ask questions like "Find drugs which interact with Tylenol, and proteins which are targeted by these drugs", or build more complex queries if you like.<p>While it is targeted at scientists in the life sciences field, we've found that many people like finding out more about drugs they're using, diseases they know about etc. We're continuing to add more data and make it more useful for the layman too.<p>We thought we'd like to show our app to HN users and solicit feedback before we embark on a big PR push. We rely on this forum heavily for info on all things startup related :)<p>Thanks
======
polyfractal
Looks cool. Small bug: When you search for something and hit the "back"
button, you get stuck at a "searching" modal dialog that can only be cleared
by hitting refresh.

~~~
pramodbiligiri
Good catch! We added a fancy "Searching" when transitioning to the SERP and
that broke the back button :|Will find a better solution.

------
revorad
This is fantastic. Do you mind telling us about how you get the data and your
search tech stack?

~~~
pramodbiligiri
Right now, most of the data is publicly available databases well known to
people in the bioinformatics domain (entrez, drugbank...). Our tech stack is a
mixture of Java/Scala, off-the-shelf frameworks and homegrown components. Our
job ad from a few months ago should tell you more -
<http://jobs.hasgeek.com/view/rrh98> or follow our engg. team on twitter -
@metaomedevs

------
keeptrying
<http://www.distilbio.com>

------
biopharma_guy
This is a great product. Being a biopharma guy I can say it has a lot of
potential. My suggestions is to push this product aggressively to launch
globally so that you will have a threshold number of users to survive the
startup.

Couple of caveats: 1\. When I type a product I have to click on search button
to get the result. Can it be such a way that only clicking on enter tab should
do the search? 2\. When I deliberately misspel a drug name it just does not
return anything. Does the search engine has auto suggestion method like
google's?

Few questions: 1\. What will be the revenue model? Will it be a SAAS? 2\. Will
there be a free version on the web? If yes then how will it be different from
paid SAAS service? 3\. Will it be limited to drug molecule and genes or it
will extend to other categories in future such as scientific literatures and
metabolic pathways?

