Show HN: (Our startup) DistilBio, a search engine for life sciences data | Hacker News Reader

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

Link: http://www.distilbio.com

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.

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.

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 :)

Thanks

View on HN

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.

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

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

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

http://www.distilbio.com

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com