Searching Web Based Medical Information
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Special Review Article Searching web based medical information Ibrahim Mansoor, MBBS. ABSTRACT Searching for references is part of everyday life in medicine. Since the arrival of the Internet, it has provided great promise for clinicians because of it’s ability to access and consolidate large amounts of knowledge and information quickly and easily. But because of the overload of the huge amounts of information, searching for particular information has now become a tedious task, which is a lso very time-consuming and frustrating. This article describes effective ways, tips, tools, detailed search techniques and strategies for searching medical information. It also lists some useful resource and database sites that can provide a lot of help for seeking accurate information. Keywords: Internet, web-based medical information, search engines. Saudi Med J 2001; Vol. 22 (9): 749-756 he Internet is a massive collection of computer do you find what you are looking for? This paper T networks that connect millions of computers, deals with this problem of finding particular medical people, software programs, databases and files. information on the Internet. The paper presents a Though it is comprised of various sections from detailed discussion of different types of search tools, newsgroups through email services, by far, the most with the main features of these major tools, there popular and fastest growing is the World Wide Web strategies, techniques and tips for the users on how to (WWW or just "Web"), cited as most important by interact with these tools, available on the Internet. two-thirds of the users, followed by electronic mail.1,2 Search tools on the web. Finding information on The Web has accelerated the growth of the Internet the Web may be difficult, but it's not impossible. As by giving it an easy to use, point and click, graphical an alternate to a central catalogue the Web offers a interface and it contains a universe of network choice of dozens of different Search Tools, each with accessible information. In February 1999, the Web its own database, command language, search contained approximately 800 million pages of capabilities, and method of displaying results. The information, increased up from 320 million in Search Tools, also known as Search Services, find December 1997.3,4 Adding to this, the fact that the documents matching your interests. Each search tool Web lacks the bibliographic controls standards. operates on its database of Uniform Source Locator There is no equivalent to the ISBN to uniquely (URLs), texts and descriptions that point to the actual identify a document; no standard system of documents on the Web.2,7 An important point to cataloguing or classification; and there is no central clarify is that whenever you search with the help of a catalogue that point to all of the Web's holdings. In search tool, you actually view data extracted from the fact, many, if not most, Web documents lack even database of this search tool and not from the whole the name of the author and the date of publication.5,6 Web. Since none of these search tool databases Now with 800 million publicly available documents include the whole Web, you get different results from — an amount that is doubling in size every 6 to 12 different search tools. All search tools provide the months, the Internet has become a vast, global search results as list of Web documents with storehouse of information. The only problem is: how hypertext links; which when clicked takes us away to From the Department of Histopathology, King AbdulAziz University Hospital, Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Address correspondence and reprint request to: Dr. Ibrahim Mansoor, c/o Mansoor Ali, PO Box 1432, Jeddah 21431, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Fax. +966 (02) 661 3164. Email: [email protected] 749 Searching web-based medical information ... Mansoor that particular Web document from the search tool. most effective for finding general information on The search tools on the Web fall into 2 main popular or scholarly subjects. If you are looking for categories: Subject Directories, which rely heavily on something specific, use a search engine.26 It is also the human element as part of their indexing strategy, important to remember that no one has categorized and Search Engines, which keep human/data the entire web. There are millions of web pages on interaction to a bare minimum. Both use software the Web and it is simply impossible to organize robots called "Spiders" that crawl the Web, everything, especially at the rate at which the Web is newsgroups, and gopher, file transfer protocol (FTP) expanding. Examples of subject directories include: and wide area information servers (WAIS) sites, About.com [http://www. About.com], Look Smart extracting URLs (addresses) and keywords to add to [http://www. looksmart.com], WebCrawler [http:// the search tool's database. Both of these search tools www.webcrawler.com], Yahoo [http:// have benefits and drawbacks, depending on what you www.yahoo.com]. are willing to sacrifice.2,7-9 New MetaCrawlers have Search engines.7-26 The Search Engines are very now emerged, as the best way for querying multiple different from directories. While humans organize engines at once. They do not maintain their one and catalog subject directories, search engines rely on database; instead, they act as middle agents and pass computer programs called spiders or robots to crawl on your query to many major search engines.7-26 the Web from one link to another, and log the words Subject directories. The subject directories are on each page into its database. When any keyword hierarchically organized indexes of subject categories related to a topic is typed into a search box, the that allow the Web searcher to browse through lists search engine scans its database and returns a file of Web sites by subject in search of relevant with links to websites containing the word or words information. They are often called subject "trees" specified. It is important to note that when you are because they start with a few main categories and using a search engine you are not searching the then branch out into subcategories, topics, and Internet "live", as it exists at this very moment. subtopics. For example, if you are looking for any Rather, you are searching a fixed database that has medical information related to "Saudi Arabia" at been compiled some time previous to your search.18,26 Yahoo, select "regional" at the top level, then While all search engines are intended to perform the "countries" at the next level, than "Saudi Arabia" at same task, each perform it in a different way, which the 3rd level, and "medical information" at the 4th leads to sometimes amazingly different results. level. This hierarchy could be represented as: Factors that influence results include the size of the regional / countries / Saudi Arabia / medical database, the frequency of updating, and the search information.27 The subject directories, simply called capabilities. Search engines also differ in their search directories, are compiled and maintained by humans, speed, the design of the search interface, the way in and therefore you can often find it a good starting which they display results, and the amount of help point for your topic. They are also useful for finding they offer. In most cases, search engines are best information on a topic when you don't have a precise used to locate a specific piece of information, such as idea of what you need. Furthermore, because their a known document, an image, or a computer maintenance includes human intervention, they program, rather than a general subject. Examples of greatly reduce the probability of retrieving results out search engines include:26 MSN Search [http:// of context. As the subject directories are categorized, search.msn.com/], AltaVista [http://www.altavista. they give links to the top levels or main pages of a com/], Ask Jeeves [http://www.askjeeves.com/], Web site rather than to individual pages and they Excite [http://www.excite.com/], Fast Search cover only a small fraction of the pages available on [http://www.fast.no/sitesearch.html], Google the Web. They are best suited for searching [http://www.google.com/], HotBot [http://www. information about a general subject for example, hotbot.com/], Infoseek [http://www.infoseek.com/], information required about medical fields such as Lycos, [http://www.lycos.com/], Northern Light pathology, ophthalmology etc or about main organs [http://www.northernlight.com/]. like breast, kidney etc, rather than for a deeper and Meta search engines. The growth in the number more specific piece of information. Many large of search engines has led to the creation of "meta" directories also provide an option to search by a search engines, often referred to as multi-threaded or keyword, which takes us directly to a specific topic multi-search engines. These search engines allow a and usually eliminates the need to work through user to search the databases of several major search numerous levels of topics and subtopics. The engines in parallel (at the same time). They do not directories rely on the judgment and expertise of the crawl the Web or maintain a database of Web pages. people compiling them and here it is obvious that Instead, they act as a middle agent, passing on the subject experts would have different and more query to the major engines like AltaVista, Excite, professional selection criteria than a hobbyist or a Lycos, WebCrawler, Yahoo and HotBot, and then casual user.26 Because directories cover only a small returning the results.23-28 The meta-search engines fraction of the pages available on the Web they are work best with simple searches.