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Navigating the Mental Health Internet |
Lesson 3.1 Search Engines
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The Google search engine indexes over 1.5 billion pages on the World Wide Web (WWW) or web as it is usually called. And thousands of sites are being added daily. While the Internet is an extraordinarily powerful information technology, it is difficult to master. There are no bibliographic standards such as those which guide the print world. There is no equivalent to the ISBN to uniquely identify a document; no standard indexing structures such as the Library of Congress catalog classification system; no central holding catalog with the Internet's entire contents. Many Internet documents lack even the name of the author and the date of publication. Thus, despite being the world's largest library, the Internet's contents are shelved in no particular order, and there is no central catalog. Instead of a central catalog, the Internet offers hundreds of different search tools, each with their own database, command language, search capabilities, and method of displaying results. The two most important tools are search engines and directories. Search engines are tools for locating resources on the Internet based on keywords. When you enter a keyword into a search engine, it compares your term with its database of keywords from Internet sites. It then generates a list of sites with that keyword. Sites are linked so you can click on them to visit. Search engines rely on "robots" or "spiders" that comb the Internet and index sites based on the presence of keywords and also by submissions from webmasters. Web searching is a nonlinear interactive process. Whereas a search on MEDLINE locates just journal articles, a search engine finds resources of many different types. My search on Metacrawler for PTSD and EMDR returned sites for:
You learn about your topic as you search, and can then refine your search. Once you find some sites that are germane to your topic, they will probably provide you with the links to other sites you will want to visit. This interconnectedness is why it's called a World Wide Web. Some search engines, such as Infoseek, have a "Find similar pages" feature, which allows you to narrow your search to sites similar to the one selected. Search Engines
Metasearch engines, such as Metacrawler and Inference, send your keyword query out to many search engines, collate the results, and eliminate duplicates. Since all search engines index only a portion of the Internet, metasearch engines may provide the broadest coverage. . Notice that Metacrawler has a "more like this" link next to each site which allows you to refine your search.
Natural Language Search Engines Natural Language Search Engines allow searches using full sentences. This is a relatively new but promising approach. AskJeeves permits this and is also a Metasearch engine.
With keyword searching, it helps to specify more than one term to narrow your search.Boolean connectors such as "and" "or" "not" are a powerful way to search. Single word searches on most topics will yield thousands or often hundreds of thousands of hits. Boolean connectors allow for more precise searches. "and" tells the search engine that both words must be present, whereas "or" searches include sites with either keyword.
Some large mental health web sites have their own search engines which function just like the Internet search engines, but they search for documents and files only on their own site. A comprehensive tutorial on web searching is available from the Teaching Library at the University of California at Berkeley. Their extensive directory of Internet search tools is constantly updated and well worth bookmarking. Spend 15-20 minutes reading the UC Berkeley Library Tutorial:
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therapists in private practice 
REQUIRED QUEST EXERCISE 1: 
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