A Million To One

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A MILLION TO ONE Web Searching: With the web now at over one trillion urls, how can you find what you‟re looking for?

Search providers around the world compete with Google… and as always it’s the underdogs who try hardest

USE THE RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE JOB Stop “Googling” and start using the web properly- this guide shows how to get your results list to slim down, and will try to prove that it’s possible to reduce your results list to a millionth of it’s original size!

Some people say that we only use ten percent of their brains and whilst I am pretty certain that they’re wrong I am also sure that most medical students haven’t tried ten percent of the internet’s resources for searching medical information. I want to show students that although Google dominates over 75-80% of the UK search market (more than anywhere else in the world), they aren’t top dog and are a victim of their own success- smaller or more enthusiastic companies are showing Google how innovation and focus counts, and using some simple tips I’m going to show you how to get from a million results to just one.

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MEDSTORY.COM

Step One: Start your search It’s rather obvious but you need to start somewhere and just to prove a point I am going to search Google for “Breast Cancer”, immediately I am faced with 45,000,000 results all wanting my attention, throwing

Medstory.com offers suggestions of what‟s relevant to your search.

Users can click then suggestions and Medstory will offer to modify the search criteria to suit.

words like “breakthrough” onto my screen… this as you may have guessed is useless to me. To solve my problem I have decided to use searchmedica.co.uk, a UK based search engine aimed specifically at medical professionals and now with med students in mind too, searching there I know that I will be given sites relevant to my needs without missing the important onesand what a surprise, searchmedica.co.uk gives returns 51,294 results, not one of which tries to sell me a secret Chinese herb! I am already down by 99.88%. Other search sites offer similar

gains just for the virtue of being focused. But what about when you have a large list and need to sort the wheat from the chaff?

Step Two: Refine your results Some websites offer just as many results as Google, but offer much more sophisticated ways of navigating the data- take Medstory.com. Using the techniques shown in this page’s side column Medstory can still offer over 40 million results but also give the user hints as to what to look for next, so within seconds I can tell you that Edith Perez is an expert in the topic and she is mentioned in 78 of the 46,000 research articles found on breast cancer.

At one hundred pages a day, I would be 1250 years old before I reached the last page.

And to further refine your results you can select if you want to see just research, trials, videos, news etc. To bring that search down to single digits.

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Medstory.com’s technology has been bought by Microsoft in order to enhance their Live search offering, available at HealthVault.com, and offers similar refinements but in a more consumer focused manner, some medical students may find it to be a helpful starting point for it’s summary section on the front page which displays the articles from sites Microsoft thinks are worth visiting. Search Medica doesn’t make users miss out, featuring refinement tools for selecting by category (e.g. News, Signs and Symptoms,

Other uses of search

Investigations etc) and also offers recommended terms, sites and concepts alongside their results to help users narrow down searches further- it’s worth noting that Search Medica themselves searched for medical students to recommend websites when building their site so the results are already pretty appealing without these tools.

OTHER LAYOUTS:

Search Medica‟s suggestions appear with sites, terms and concepts on the left hand side.

Here’s some quick tips for what to do when you start researching a topic on the internet:

1. Start with a visual: Image searches are a really under used tool, make the most of them by searching for a disease when you first hear about it, your mind will fizz with the visual stimulation of all those images giving you clues- after all sight is an important tool for doctors, you’ll recognise CharcotMarie-Tooth syndrome 100 times faster in hospital if you

favourite results to return to later. It’s dead simple but can be great when you’ve found something helpful the moment before your mate knocks on your door and requests your company into town. Some may also find this useful for SSM periods and revision.

3. Just go on Wikipedia: Although unpopular with

know the characteristic leg

some tutors wikipedia offers

shape it brings.

one good thing- citations…

Starting your search this

The category selection tool in Search Medica allows you to narrow down results immediately to the information you want.

some Wikipedia user has

way should make life that little

already done the leg work for

bit easier.

you! So skip the article and look at the resource list for a

2. Scrapbooking:

fast way to get the reliable info.

Some sites like Healthvault.com allow users to make a “scrapbook” of their

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Microsoft‟s Healthvault may be consumer orientated but offers useful summaries from the Mayo Clinic and similar sites.

And now for the main event... The basic commands

Slightly more complex:

Any searcher worth their salt knows the following commands: • “ ”: Looks for the exact phrase between them. • -: excludes pages containing the word that follows it.

•„Site:‟: Allows you to determine where the results come from- e.g. .ac limits results to pages like www.liv.ac.uk and www.man.ac.uk. • OR: allows more flexibility e.g. Site:(.ac OR .edu) gives results like www.liv.acuk and www.stanford.edu

The commands above are the basics available in almost any large search providers arsenal, to find more you can look for their “search operators”- these can allow you to find pages that have specific attributes- like having RSS feeds, containing certain words in their titles etc. For this demonstration however all you need are the commands above to shrink that results list to a millionth of its original size- the goal of this is to prove that it’s possible and not to find the best result in the world, you’ll probably get to that point before you hit this level of result reduction. To make the point I will use Live.com and search for “Breast cancer” to start off, the result is a staggering 84.2 million results- so the goal is to get no more than 84 relevant results.

Step One: Removing the clutter. Removing herbal remedies is a good start for this topic, the search term is now:

breast cancer -herbal ..and this gives 50.8 million results, a 40% reduction in results. Similar techniques allow us to remove other terms such as “journal”, “homeopathy”, “campaign” etc, giving us a search like the following:

breast Cancer -glossary -journal -herbal homeopathy -research -campaign ..making 26.2 million results.

ROUND UP

Step Two: Setting limits. Having removed all terms that “cluttered” my results, I can now tell the engine where to look precisely, for my needs an academic site is handy so I add the requirement for all pages to be from “.ac.uk” sites:

Breast Cancer -glossary -journal -herbal research -campaign site:(.ac.uk) And now I am down to 45,200 sites. Adding quotation marks (“”) around “breast cancer” narrows this down further to 30,800.

Step Three: Brushing up the results. Now I have a clearer view of what the search engine thinks I want, the next step is simply to get more specific and add terms that I want more focus on, we’re all used to doing this but if you do it too soon you could easily miss out on some relevant results. Adding the terms pathology, structure and function to the search returned 112 results. From here 84 is a stones throw away and by adding conditions like “-pdf” and “-dictionary” the final result is 73 results!

84,200,000 to 73 results = 99.9999% result reduction Just imagine how easy that would have been by using a more specialised search engine!

HEALTHVAULT.COM

MEDSTORY

SEARCHMEDICA

GOOGLE

•Scrapbooking •Highlights “useful” articles •Consumer focused •No listed results number

•42,000,000 results •By far the best in refinements offered •Simple layout

•51,249 results •Sites recommended by medical students •Refinements suggested

•45,700,000 results •Little refinement offered

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