The New York Times reported yesterday that Microsoft will buy a health vertical search engine called Medstory. The “intelligent” search engine looks for health information using a database of information aggregated from medical journals, government documents and the Internet in general.

The terms of the sale were not disclosed.

As Peter Neupert, vice president for health strategy at Microsoft, notes: “Clearly,” Mr. Neupert said, “search is a critical part of that better end-to-end experience for consumers.”

Microsoft’s eventual goal is to link personal information like age, sex, family history, etc. to search so that search results are tailored individually and can identify treatments, drug interactions and interesting articles in medical journal.

“Health search could be way more relevant,” says Neupert. “You don’t need to see thousands of results. What you want to know is, what does this mean to me personally?”

This is the same basic question that ALL vertical search engines attempt to address. And as Richard MacManus points out, the acquisition of Medstory is part of a larger web trend: the continued rise of vertical search. Interestingly, he argues that Microsoft’s main interest in Medstory could be that Microsoft wants to enter and dominate the vertical search engine niche for health before Google has a chance to get its foot in.