Microsoft on Monday announced plans to acquire California-based Medstory, a start-up company that has developed a specialized online search engine to provide health and medical information to consumers, the New York Times reports.
The search engine uses artificial intelligence techniques to provide health information from medical journals, government documents and Web sites (Lohr, New York Times, 2/27). Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the acquisition at the Health Information Management and Systems Society conference in New Orleans. The companies did not disclose the terms of the acquisition (Bishop, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2/27).