Week 10 Lecture
Week 10 is when we evaluate search outcomes – this should lead us to better forming our search questions to achieve better more accurate results. Our questions become more 'searchable'. We can also take those outcomes and view them in meaningful ways.
Introduction
Information is stored on the internet in websites that contain pages. People use search engines to find the information relevant to them, on those pages. Well how do the search engines know they are there? They use crawlers, also called spiders or 'bots' that go out and read the pages of content, adding it to the database of the search engine. For this reason, some search engines are better for what you are searching on than others. There is also a lot of content that is never crawled and cannot be found in a search engine. These content areas store their information in databases but you can get access to them, if you know where to look. This is referred to as the 'invisible web'. Here are two such sites, you may have already visited not knowing their content pages are not bot or spider crawled:
Health Finder:
RX LIST
Tips for better searching
We have learned about many things this semester including the motivating factors for a patient or provider to seek healthcare information. We know that some of the issues around seeking is lack of access to technology or lack of ability to search. We also learned that people encounter search fatigue and often 'give up' or accept poor quality information from their search results. I'm certain that most of you have experienced some of the frustration's that other healthcare information seekers and provider seekers have experienced. What are some of the ways that we can overcome these frustrations? By performing better searches to obtain better outcomes from our searches. Here is a list of 'quick tips' that you will try and comment on in our discussion this week:
Quotes
Put your search phase in quotes ‘diet for diabetes’
Use Google, it can search inside websites
inurl
Search within a Web address using the “inurl” command via Google; search for words within the web address itself called the Uniform Resource Locator or URL. An example, if you only want to find results from sites that have the word “ehealth” in their URL, you would type this into Google's search bar: inurl:ehealth. Your search results will only contain websites with that word in their URL.
Boolean
Use addition and subtraction symbols referred to as Boolean's to refine your search. For example if you wanted information on adult vaccinations and were getting a lot of results related to children you could try this; 'vaccinations' -children.
Restrictions
Restrict the domains you are searching; you can choose to have your search question go to only certain domains like only .gov sites or only .org sites. Here is an example; .gov “diabetes”
Find It!
Search for a word within a page or set of results by pressing CTRL+F on your keyboard, this invokes the 'find' bar in your browser. Type in your search term and you will find any results of just that within the page you are looking at.
Search Engine
Use the right search engine, learn more here:
Which Search Engine Should I Use?
Instead of reaching for the same search engine and the same search process that you always use – with limited results – why not step back a bit and see if there's a different way you can accomplish your next search task
Invisible Web
Find out more about the invisible web:
Conclusion
I'd like to wrap this up with a note on visual search. Microsoft has invested heavily in cloud technology including its own proprietary chip used in its data centers to process images faster than ever before. Why would they do that? Increasingly we see more visual representations of our search results. Visuals are dominating social media especially Pinterest, Instagram etc. What does this mean to healthcare? It is the future, it will reduce healthcare cost, it will improve healthcare outcomes and quality of care. It should also reduce mistakes and unneeded procedures and tests along with visits.
