Company's Velocity software will power searching, indexing for the world's largest medical library The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) has chosen Vivisimo to provide new search functionality at its Web site, the company announced.Vivisimo, which has also supplied enterprise search services to the U.S. Department of Defense and USA.gov, will power search functions on NLM’s Web pages, documents, and archives, the company said Wednesday. Vivisimo will provide search technology to both NLM.nih.gov and NLM’s consumer-focused sister Web site, MedlinePlus.gov.The amount of the NLM’s contract, awarded Jan. 3, wasn’t announced. The NLM hasn’t set a target for the search functionality to be available, Vivisimo said. Visitors to the sites, using the Vivisimo Velocity enterprise search software, will be able to search for health topics such as arthritis or back pain, Vivisimo said. Site visitors can also ask questions, such as, “What are the symptoms of lupus?” and receive immediate answers.An advantage of Vivisimo is its contextual search capabilities, allowing users to find and manipulate all available content regardless of where it is located in the organization, said Raul Valdes-Perez, Vivisimo’s chief executive officer and co-founder. At the same time, Vivisimo offers the simplicity of consumer search, the company said.NLM, the world’s largest medical library, contains more than 8 million items, including books, journals, microfilms, and photographs. With that amount of data, the library needs “a flexible enterprise search engine that will index all this,” Valdes-Perez said. Government agencies need to surpass what’s available in the private sector to justify their existence, he added. “The National Library of Medicine has great expertise in medical information, and the best enterprise search technology is needed for them to provide a service that surpasses everything else,” he said.Government agencies, to provide better service, need to index and provide context for the information they have instead of “treating everything as one document and indexing it in a one-size-fits-all way,” Valdes-Perez said.NLM officials weren’t immediately available for comment Thursday. Vivisimo has provided search options to the public for U.S. government documents such as the 2006 federal budget, the 9/11 Commission Report, and the Iraq Study Group Report. DatabasesSoftware Development