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 Orthogate arrow Guide to the Internet


Chapter 3 - Searching

Chapter 3 Topics

Intelligent Search Technology

by
Eugene Sherry & Xan Phung

The Internet is failing us and it's because of inadequate search engines.

We are becoming reliant upon the net for most areas of human endeavour:
goods and services, science, government, entertainment and healthcare. It's the new Societal Revolution; if we are not careful, it may spell our end.

The current size of the Web is 800 million pages (6 terabytes of data on 3 million servers) and
the current general search engines can't keep up (and may have given up!)

In 1997 Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles estimated that the six major search engines covered 60% of the web, with the largest coverage of a single engine being one-third. They repeated this study in 1999 (with 11 engines) and found that they covered 42% and no one engine covered more than 16%.In 2001 such coverage may fall below 8%.

Reasons for this failure are:

  • the sheer size of the task, 
  • the network bandwidth, 
  • and the costs.

It appears that search engines realize that most enquiries can be satisfied with a small database and so designers direct resources elsewhere (free email, etc.).

For these reasons, we have maintained the necessity of specialized or niche engines such as OrthoSearch. It differs from general search engines in these ways:

Features General Search Engines OrthoSearch
Coverage    
-extent of cover <16% of web >75% of relevant subset and Medline
-nature of cover Random Structured.Limits defined by policy framework.
-number of links to relevant topic Limited.Yahoo has 62 ortho links Thousands of links
Integration of search paradigms    
-paradigms used for searching Term lookup, directory and metasearch paradigms separate and poorly integrated. Integrates paradigms into single interface
Intelligent categorisation of search results    
-sorting method Uses relevance score (arbitrary and prone to manipulation). Relevance score used only to rank pages within a resource
-categorisation Linear list Directory hierarchy,easy to drill down
-relevance of result obtained Very low. Hard to browse down long list Very high as search focused on relevant subset
User friendly graphical query construction interface    
-type of interface Text based.Need to learn Boolean syntax and precedence rules. Can use graphical pie-chart based user interface in addition to conventional text based one.
Ability to understand simple English    
-understanding of synonyms Uses only exact match Ability to looks up synonyms via thesaurus under development

 How to Use OrthoSearch

  • Enter keyword
  • Select category to browse
  • Skim headings to rapidly drill down
  • See individual sites intelligently described/indexed.
  • Relevance is indicated by a page's "matches"
  • Comprehensive list of occurences made available

Orthosearch http://www.orthosearch.com/ 
Organized into 11 categories
"Osteolysis" brought up 200 pages in the Journals category - mostly abstracts of journal articles

Orthopaedic Web Links OWL OWL 

Browsable collection of over 3000 links, over 40 different categories. Part of the Orthogate Project and one of the original sources for the Orthosearch Database.
Inherently impossible to keep up.
Some form of comprehensive guide to the Orthopaedic Internet is neccessary if quality assessment is to be done.

Other Resources on the Orthopaedic Internet

Textbooks

Wheeless Textbook of Orthopaedics
http://www.medmedia.com/

WorldOrtho
http://www.worldortho.com/

Illustrations & Image Banks

Orthopod Images http://www.imagelib.telemed.co.uk/default.htm

Belfast Image Bank http://os1.os.qub.ac.uk/catalogue/index.html

Trauma Image Bank http://www.trauma.org/imagebank/imagebank.html

Mailing Lists

Archives + search engine

Orthopod
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/orthopod/archive.html

Hand
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/hand/archive.html

Arthroplasty
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/arthroplasty/archive.html

Spine
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/spine/archive.html

Sports Medicine
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/sportmedorth/archive.html

Case Presentations

Dupont Institute
http://gait.aidi.udel.edu/res695/homepage/pd_
ortho/educate/clincase/clcasehp.htm

GICD Case Studies in Spinal Instrumentation
http://www.gicd.org/casestud.htm

Belgian Orthoweb Case Reports
http://www.belgianorthoweb.be/cases_uk.htm

OWL
http://owl.orthogate.org/casedisc.html

Patient Information

Southern California Orthopaedic Institute
http://www.scoi.com/

Orthogate Patient Education
http://patient.orthogate.org/

OWL Patient Information Pages
http://owl.orthogate.org/orthpat.html

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