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The Search for a Perfect Search Engine

By Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT

Please Note: If you are an old hand at finding information on the Internet, you may know everything we talk about in the articles in this section. However, if you're just getting started, these may prove very helpful.

If you ask ten search engines to locate articles on any topic, you will be given anywhere from "none found" to hundreds of thousands. Why? Because each search engine uses unique methods to look through millions of sites and bring you the ones that they believe most likely contain information you've asked them to find.

The result of these difference parameters is that a highly rated site on one list may mean someone hired by that company has personally reviewed each site listed. It may simply mean that a particular word appears frequently within a website, regardless of the quality of the site. It may mean that a site has paid in some way for that placement. Even the words used to describe each site varies from list to list, with some descriptions provided by the website and some written by reviewers.

In addition, many sites in these lists may concern your topic only tangentially. For example, you may click on a link in a group of prostate cancer sites and notice it primarily offers news about musicians in Ireland. A little sleuthing will uncover the fact that one of the group is a survivor of that cancer. Such tidbits of information may be interesting, but discovering it is frustrating and time-consuming if you're looking for clinical material.

You may even notice that some search engines claim to look through other search engines and directories, which is supposed to save you time. A careful analysis, however, will reveal sites are missing from the list, again, because of the parameters used by the program. Nevertheless, these "combination" search engines can be a good place to begin.

Incidentally, some search engines use a feature called "fuzzy logic." That means that if you misspell a word (perhaps typing canzer instead of cancer), you will still get a list of cancer websites, including astrological charts. Other search engines require you to be more specific. In fact, in some cases you may get very little if you use kidney cancer, but asking for "renal cell neoplasms" will net you more (or vice versa). Therefore, knowing the many ways in which people refer to your disease can be a great help in finding as much information as possible.

There is a HUGE pile of money to be made by any search engine that can quickly look through millions of sites and accurately bring you only the ones that clearly reflect your interests and needs.

Until that is possible -- and despite all the drawbacks of current technology -- we recommend you use several of the major search engines we list at the end of this article. You may just find something that is exactly what you need to know. Besides, these search engines don't cost anything, so perhaps we shouldn't be too fussy that a free service isn't perfect.

Outdated Recommendations and Inactive Sites

It would be too cumbersome for a search engine, even the most powerful ones, to scan through every website on the whole Internet every time you want information. Consequently, search engines are more or less like directories. They create a large database in which they store information they have previously gathered. Then, when you ask for a specific topic, they go into that database and pull out the ones they think match your request.

The problem is that keeping up a huge database is a major job. That's why you'll often find inactive sites and be given "can't find" messages when you click on a site's name. There is tremendous variation in the ability of these services to clean out old information.

Try These Search Engines on for Size

Although the best database for clinical research is MEDLINE, which you get from PubMed, there is also a world of material in thousands of websites across the Internet that might give you ideas for exploring some facet of your disease that you may not find easily on MEDLINE.

Given great variation in the reliability of search engines, it behooves you to experiment with several and below we list five that have proved helpful in the past from time to time.

AltaVista — AskJeeves — Dogpile — Google — Yahoo!

© Copyright 2002, Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT