Healia, one of the leading new health care vertical search engines, despite being an early stage start-up, has already attracted the attention of the big boys. And one of them, Meredith the publisher of lots of female-aimed magazines, decided that it liked it so much it bought the company yesterday. It’s going to use the technology at home, and then try to sell it on.

In addition, Meredith and Healia will expand the functionality of Healia.com and will offer the technology through licensing and distribution agreements with select health organizations, consumer Web sites, employers and other premier partners.

Hopefully they’ll let it alone enough to let Tom Eng and his team keep building it out.