Launching the Re-Engineered tala-med Medical Search Engine: CMS Integration and Index-Optimized ETL Pipeline

The web offers an abundance of health-related information, but quality and trustworthiness are often lacking. To address this, the tala-med search engine was introduced as a non-commercial platform for German evidence-based health information, drawing on hand-picked, quality-assessed sources. An early prototype was positively evaluated, but technical limitations hindered further development. The system was therefore re-engineered using open, modular technologies and a scalable Apache Nutch-based crawler. Key components include an index-optimized ETL pipeline with boilerplate removal, de-duplication, and metadata enrichment, as well as content integration via a WordPress-based CMS. The platform is deployed across two virtual servers to separate crawling from the user-facing service, ensuring stability and scalability. The resulting system demonstrates a modular and maintainable architecture that supports scalable ingestion and flexible content management. The public instance of the platform is accessible at https://suche.tala-med.info. Future work will address automated index evaluation and fine-grained metadata enrichment to support filter-based search and domain adaptation.