Abstract
Negotiating the information superhighway can become as routine as a daily commute.
Patients today often arrive in the clinical setting armed with questions, ideas, and information they obtained on the Internet. The sheer amount of information online may seem daunting, but sorting through it is essential to your role as an educator-you can help clarify information and identify reliable online resources and support networks. So how do you find what you're looking for? And what's the best way to evaluate the reliability of online information?
Search engines (such as Excite, AltaVista, Northern Light, Yahoo!, and Infoseek) allow users to find links to Web sites by entering a keyword or words. Following are tips for searching:
Start a simple search (for example, search for "troglitazone") with the basic systems, leaving the advanced search tools for more complex searches (when, for example, you may want to search for "antidiabetic drugs" instead of "troglitazone").
Know which word links to use when performing a search using multiple keywords. Quotation marks keep words together for phrase searching (for example, "congestive heart failure"). Some search engines recognize the plus sign to identify words that must appear in the search (for example, +heart +failure). The minus sign and the word "NOT" exclude words (for example, heart-failure).
Try other search engines when your first search yields unsatisfactory outcomes, and be sure to evaluate the performance of each search engine. Because of the competitive market, these sites are continuously being improved.
Make sure keywords are spelled correctly (although some search engines can understand misspellings).
Use an asterisk as a truncation symbol to cover all possible related concepts or topics. For example, if you are not sure if "drug book" is the correct keyword, truncate the phrase and add an asterisk (drug*); the search results will list a wide variety of sites, including information on "drug handbooks" and "drug pamphlets."