General Search Engines Research Articles

Discovering research resources: Researchers' use of libraries and other information sources

In 2001 the newly established Research Support Libraries Group, set up jointly by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the British Library, in partnership with the higher education funding bodies for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the national libraries of Scotland and Wales, commissioned an extensive research study of the working patterns and research behaviour of academic and other researchers in the UK. Researchers’ Use of Libraries and Other Information Sources found evidence of key differences in research requirements between the main subject groups ‐ Medical and Biological Sciences; Physical Sciences and Engineering; Social Sciences; Area Studies and Languages; Arts and Humanities ‐ particularly in diversity of required research materials and their providers, continued importance of physical access to research resources, and requirements for mediated information and library services. On the other hand, in all subject groups a significant number of researchers share an increasing reliance on remote resource discovery and retrieval, low levels of use and awareness of research resources outside the higher education sector, and a marked preference for generic search engines for web resource access, rather than reliance on subject and institutional mediated gateways and portals. The chapter presents the evidence gathered to support these and other conclusions, and considers the implications for research resource providers within the education and cultural heritage sectors.

Compiling document collections from the Internet

Presently domain specific search engines are becoming popular because they offer greater accuracy, when compared to general purpose search engines. In this study, a method for collecting domain specific documents from the net was developed for the purpose of improving search results. The main thrust of our approach is to use several metrics to estimate the relevance of every automatically discovered document by a crawler regarding a topic of interest. This type of search resulted in two important findings. First, the time required for manual analysis of document content by the crawler was significantly reduced; second, the content quality of selected documents was improved. These results suggest that the rough estimation of precision and recall calculated in this study offer great promise.

Health care resources on the Internet: a guide for librarians and health care consumers

Health care resources on the Internet: a guide for librarians and health care consumers

MED21/393: ICD as a Search Tool for Medical Internet Resources

IntroductionThe Internet offers information on specific diseases on WWW-server distributed over the entire world. Selecting the appropriate information resource is a non-trivial task. Several approaches (like MeSH, MedPix) exist to describe the contents of Web pages. However, the majority of the Web sites do not make use of these schemas. Automatic (or semi-automatic) linking of medical records to information resources on the internet is not sufficiently supported. ICD (International Classification of Diseases) is the standard for coding the diagnosis in medical records. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of ICD - based search tools.MethodsA general ICD Meta-Search Engine (ICD-Search) was established to perform ICD-based Internet searches. From the records of the Großhadern University Hospital, the 20 most frequent diagnosis were selected. The diseases are coded with ICD-9 by the medical personnel of the hospital. The English version of the ICD-9 was chosen for performing the internet study. General search engines (Yahoo, Lycos, AltaVista) were used to retrieve medical information corresponding to the selected ICD codes. The first 50 hits were included in the study. The Web pages were scored according to accessibility (information could be retrieved) of the Web pages and the contents (reflects ICD code). The quality of information (current state of knowledge, complete information, comprehensive presentation) was not take into account. Also the results of the different search engines were compared. This study was repeated with specialized medical search engines (MedHunt) . Scoring of the results was performed accordingly.ResultsBoth Lycos and AltaVista searched resulted in a large number of hits. The range for AltaVista was between 114.440 (Coronary atherosclerosis) and 405.770 (Alcohol dependence syndrome). The Lycos search resulted in no categories and four sites (Coronary atherosclerosis) and one site for Alcohol dependence syndrome. MedHunt found 131 corresponding sites for Coronary atherosclerosis and 112 for Alcohol dependence syndrome. The median scores for Lycos and Altavista were in the same order with some extreme low scores for AltaVista on selected diseases. Lycos, in general, scored better than Lycos and AltaVista but show a low number of hits for several diseases. MedHunt produced both good scores and a sufficient number of hits. The results from Lycos and AltaVista were compared. It showed, that only 15% of the web pages were found by both search engines.ConclusionAll search engines found Internet sites that corresponded to the selected ICD-codes. The standard vocabulary provided by ICD proved to be a good basis for linking medical diagnosis with Internet Web sites. Specialized medical search engines perform better than general ones. Search engines, that also give information on the quality of information, offer additional value.

Digestive disease resources on the Internet.

The aim of this study is to help digestive disease professionals fully utilize the resources available on the Internet for patient care, education, and research. The following search resources were employed to locate websites: general search engines--Lycos, Metacrawler, Webcrawler, and Yahoo!; medical search engines--HealthWeb, MedMatrix, MedWeb, and MedWebPlus; website links; and publications. The inclusion of web sites was based on their content. Each site was evaluated with respect to its authorship, attribution, currency, and disclosure. All digestive disease professional organizations and academic centers that met the above criteria were included. Only nutrition sites with relevance to digestive diseases were included. A variety of very useful web sites related to digestive diseases exist on the Internet, and their numbers are growing. Many of these sites have valuable information that can be used to improve patient care, promote medical education, and facilitate research. Digestive disease professionals should adopt the Internet and address the many issues raised by this technology.

Health information and interaction on the internet: a survey of female urinary incontinence

Objective: To evaluate the internet as a source of information about urinary incontinence and to explore interactive facilities.Design: Limited survey of internet resources.Subjects: 75 websites providing information about incontinence and...

Nonprofit Internet review: just what resources are available?

AbstractThis paper, the first of a number of short reviews of nonprofit Internet activity, outlines the nature of the resources that are currently available to nonprofits on‐line. It lists a number of sites on the Internet and gives a short summary of what is obtainable on each site. The paper concludes with information about general search engines and recommends perseverance in trying the different engines in order to find the relevant data. Copyright © 1999 Henry Stewart Publications

Trends in medical information retrieval on internet

Information on the World Wide Web is unstructured, distributed, multimedia and multilingual. Many tools have been developed to help users search for useful information: subject hierarchies, general search engines, browsers and search assistants. Although helpful, they present serious limitations, mainly in terms of precision, multilingual indexing and distribution. In this paper, we cover some on-line solutions to medical information discovery and present our own approach, the MARVIN (multi-agent retrieval vagabond on information network) project, which tackles medical information research with specialized cooperative retrieval agents. We also draw some outlines for future extensions.

A STRATEGIC METAGAME PLAYER FOR GENERAL CHESS‐LIKE GAMES

This paper introduces METAGAMER, the first program designed within the paradigm of Metagame‐playing (Metagame). This program plays games in the class of symmetric chess‐like games, which includes chess, Chinese chess, checkers, draughts, and Shogi. METAGAMER takes as input the rules of a specific game and analyzes those rules to construct an efficient representation and an evaluation function for that game; they are used by a generic search engine. The strategic analysis performed by METAGAMER relates a set of general knowledge sources to the details of the particular game. Among other properties, this analysis determines the relative value of the different pieces in a given game. Although METAGAMER does not learn from experience, the values resulting from its analysis are qualitatively similar to values used by experts on known games and are sufficient to produce competitive performance the first time METAGAMER plays a new game. Besides being the first Metagame‐playing program, this is the first program to have derived useful piece values directly from analysis of the rules of different games. This paper describes the knowledge implemented in METAGAMER, illustrates the piece values METAGAMER derives for chess and checkers, and discusses experiments with METAGAMER on both existing and newly generated games.

Ovulation and formation of the corpus luteum in the mare

Medical imaging education often has limited representation in formal medical student curricula. Although the need for greater inclusion of radiology material is generally agreed on, the exact skillset that should be taught is less clear. The purpose of our study was to perform a needs assessment for a national radiology curriculum for medical students.We analyzed data from previous unpublished portions of the American College of Radiology/Alliance of Medical Student Educators in Radiology survey of Deans and Radiology Chairs regarding prevalence of radiology curricular revisions, assessment tools, use of the American College of Radiology Appropriateness Criteria, and resources used in curriculum revision. We also performed a literature search through both PubMED and a general search engine (Google) to identify available resources for designing and implementing imaging curricula and curricular revisions.Medical school deans and chairs reported a need for more overall radiology content; one of every six programs (15%) reported they had no recognized imaging curriculum. Of schools currently with imaging curricula, 82% have undergone revision in the last 10 years using a variety of different resources, but there is no universally agreed on guide or standard curriculum. The PubMED and Google searches identified only 23 and eight resources, respectively, suggesting a sizable deficit in available guidance; however, a single published medical student radiology curriculum is available through the Alliance of Medical Student Educators in Radiology.There is a need, but few available resources, to guide educators in adding imaging content to medical school curricula. We postulate that a standardized national curriculum directed by a focused skillset may be useful to educators and could result in greater uniformity of imaging skills among graduating US medical students. A proposed skillset to guide a national curriculum in radiology is described.

Competition In Search Engine Market

Google has been very successful in becoming the dominant search engine platformin the US and Western countries. In contrast to its success in the US and Westerncountries, Google does not have much luck in some Asian countries such as Chinaand Korea. Google is far behind in terms of search market share in China and Korea.In this paper, we model the search engine market as a two-sided markets model andanalyze the industry structure and competition of the search engine market. First, wepresent a mathematical model for a general search engine two-sided market. Then weuse the model to analyze the search engine history and explain why multiple searchengines could co-exist in the early days of the search engine history. We also explainhow Google, a latecomer in the search market, could become the leading search engine,and how Google has strengthened its leading position. Next we apply the modelto China and Korea’s search markets and analyze how Google could lose the game tolocal search companies. In the end, we propose some strategies on how search enginemarket leaders could maintain and strengthen their leading positions.