Internet Search Strategies

The following tips can help you find reliable health information online.

American Academy of Family Physicians: More than 200 articles plus medical dictionary and flow charts. Warning: the database "Herbal and Alternative Remedies" contains many monographs that are extremely misleading because they list common uses but fail to note which ones don't work.
American Academy of Pediatrics: Hundred of position statements and articles about children's health and disease
Cleveland Clinic Health Information Center: Hundreds of brief articles
MEDLINEplus Drug Information: Database of 9,000 prescription and nonprescription drugs
Merck Manual of Medical Information: Home Edition: Consumer version of Merck Manual
National Institutes of Health Consumer Health Information: Links to more than 250 reports

Google.com can search more than 1.3 billion Web pages in less than a second. The "Cached" link in each result may even access pages that no longer exist on their original Web site but are stored in the Google archive. It is possible to restrict searches to only government sites or specific individual sites. a For optimal efficiency, read the search tips and then set your preferences. Most people will find it best to search for 100 pages at a time, limited to English, with "Safe Search turned on to filter out pornographic sites that use misleading metatags to attractirrelevant traffic. Google also has a search engine for archived newsgroup messages.
Babel Fish provides English translations of text or Web pages written in Chinese, French, German, Korean, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

MEDLINEplus: Free searching of the National Library of Medicine database of medical journal articles
Clinical Queries: Tends to retrieve the most relevant citations.
PaperChase: A more elaborate system, available for free trial or paid subscription.

This page was prevised on September 1, 2001.