Digital Literacy: How to Search the Web

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e are living in the era of information. Information is knowledge, and knowledge is power. But how to find what you look for? That is why it is important to learn and to develop "digital literacy skills". Nowadays it is so common to find patients who look for answers to their health problems before they go to their primary doctor. With the information accessible to any person from their computers, lot of people without access to the health care system will try to cure themselves. But what type of answers are people finding? I think we have to spread awareness about this fact in the health care community. And that is why we have to learn how to search for information on internet. This presentation was made by Patricia Anderson. I highly recommend it. At the end of the post you will find more links to improve your searching skills.

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What is the Deep Web?

With Google we just can access a small quantity of data, as I told you, google is just the tip of the iceberg, the rest of information that exist can be accessed through other search engines, the fact is that we have to learn how, even when now it is easy to look for videos, images, ppt presentations, animations, etc, we have to learn how, and to keep in mind that we can not access all the information just using one search engine, the information is there, that is why is so important to know many different search engines, databases, etc. If you don't find something with one search engine, you have to use another. And keep in mind that the results you obtain change from country to country even when you use the same search engine, just try with a simple search in google, then go to preference and change the language of preference, and try again, you will see that the results are different. This video show you a brief explanation about the deep web. So pay attention and spread the knowledge.

Is it everything in Google?

I use Google a lot, because with my e-mail account can access many different services like notebook, blogger, video, images, page creator, reader, etc. that with a little bit of imagination complement each others and make my life easy, a little dependent, but more efficient in compensation. But is it every thing in Google? the answer is NOT, not all is in google. Google is just the tip of the iceberg, there is a lot of information ( in many different formats) that we can access through other search engines. But Google is so good that some times we forget that, and sometimes we assume that when we don't find something in google that just do not exist on the web, what is not true. That's why is so important to learn how to search for the information we want. It is important for us to become familiar with medical databases. Here I just leave a list of some of them, you have to spend some time looking at them, to become familiar with the information you will find in them.
Medical Databases list:
STAT!Ref Online
Promedicum
PubMedCentral
McGraw-Hill's Access Medicine
Medscape
Wiley InterScience
TRIP Database
Thieme-connect
Taylor and Francis Group
Springerlink
ScienceDirect
ProQuest
Welcome to Ovid
Merck Medicus
Pub Med
MDCONSULT
McGraw-Hill's AccessScience
Biblioteca Cochrane Plus
HINARI Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative
HighWire Press
Emedicine
Doyma
Ebsco Journal Portal
BMJ Journals Online
Blackwell Synergy
BioMed Central

Microsoft buys MedStory

Thanks to New Media for the head's up about Microsoft buying MedStory. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, MedStory is a rather extraordinary new medical search engine. What makes it special is not so much the actual search results, which seem to be identical to those from Google for the same search, as how the results are organized -- a granular display. A search for any medical or health topic will initially default to results MedStory believes are appropriate for consumers. These will be grouped under their "Health" tab (on the right hand side of the screen.Isn't that exciting? I like to teach this to students as something to use when a topic is new to them. Look at how much you can learn about a topic without even clicking on any of the search results!. From the initial search result screen, you can then click on any topic to focus in on one of the search results, or you can click on the "Research" tab, or you can click on one of the icons right above the results to focus in on a publication type. In this image, I've done all of these -- from an initial search on Diabetes, I then selected the "Research" tab, chose the subtopic of Glycosylated Hemoglobin, and finally selected the publication type of Clinical Trials.
MedStory is a rather extraordinary new medical search engine. Now you go try it out, and see what you think!