Herbert: Semantic Search Engine for Herbal Medicine

Total retail sales of herbal pharmaceuticals surpassed $8.8 billion domestically and the growth has been accelerating over the past decade.  Although there is a lot of interest in herbal medication it is difficult for consumers to get trustworthy, reliable, and easy to understand information about the treatments. 

Standard web searches return a lot of information, but leave it up to the user to sift through all the pages to find the information that is relevant to them. Other services are designed for medical professionals and use complicated jargon that make it difficult for the layperson to understand.  Herbert aims to solve these problems by providing a simplistic interface where users search for herbs or conditions and receive summarized curated content aggregated from reputable sources such as MedlinePlus and PubMed.