Suddenly, health portals are rage again: Healthline, a new health portal and search engine out of San Francisco, launched today with some serious amount of money. So far, investors have poured $24 million into the company, and it will get another $13 milion “that should be in place in the next 30 to 60 days,’’ Shell says. Backers include VantagePoint Venture Partners and JHK Investments.

The site is between a general search engine such as Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and a “medical destination site’’ with limited content such as WebMD (NSDQ: WBMD), says the company. The company’s crawled 62,000 of the top health web sites (they have 40 million pages indexed) and hooked in with some of the top medical databases.

The business model involves paid listings and highly targeted branded advertising, as well the possibility of premium services. The company will also sell its search technology to other medical sites.  It also draws news from Topix.net.

Reuters: Healthline was founded as YourDoctor.com in 1999, didn;t work and morphed into an enterprise play called InterMap Systems...now this spin-off.

More detailed cover and podcast with CEO here…

Related:

-- Steve Case Developing Health portal; Buys Four Content Companies

-- WebMD Stock Rises Rapidly After IPO