thePBLsite.

com

A MILLION TO ONE
Web Searching:
With the web now at over one trillion urls, how can you find what you‟re looking for?

Search providers
around the world
compete with
Google… and as
always it’s the
underdogs who
try hardest

USE THE RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE

JOB
Stop “Googling” and start using the web properly- this guide shows how to get your results list to slim down,
and will try to prove that it’s possible to reduce your results list to a millionth of it’s original size!

Some people say that we only use ten percent of their brains and whilst I am pretty certain
that they’re wrong I am also sure that most medical students haven’t tried ten percent of the
internet’s resources for searching medical information. I want to show students that although
Google dominates over 75-80% of the UK search market (more than anywhere else in the
world), they aren’t top dog and are a victim of their own success- smaller or more enthusiastic
companies are showing Google how innovation and focus counts, and using some simple tips
I’m going to show you how to get from a million results to just one.

[1]
MEDSTORY.COM Step One: Start your search
It’s rather obvious but you need
to start somewhere and just to prove
a point I am going to search Google
for “Breast Cancer”, immediately I
am faced with 45,000,000 results all
wanting my attention, throwing
words like “breakthrough” onto my
screen… this as you may have
guessed is useless to me.
To solve my problem I have
Medstory.com offers
suggestions of what‟s decided to use searchmedica.co.uk, a
relevant to your UK based search engine aimed
search.
specifically at medical professionals
and now with med students in mind
too, searching there I know that I will
be given sites relevant to my needs
without missing the important ones-
and what a surprise,
searchmedica.co.uk gives returns
51,294 results, not one of which tries
to sell me a secret Chinese herb! I am
already down by 99.88%.
Users can click then Other search sites offer similar
suggestions and
Medstory will offer to
modify the search
criteria to suit.
gains just for the virtue of being
focused. But what about when you
have a large list and need to sort the
wheat from the chaff?
Step Two: Refine your results
Some websites offer just as many
results as Google, but offer much
more sophisticated ways of
navigating the data- take
Medstory.com. Using the techniques
shown in this page’s side column
Medstory can still offer over 40
million results but also give the user
hints as to what to look for next, so
within seconds I can tell you that
Edith Perez is an expert in the topic
and she is mentioned in 78 of the
46,000 research articles found on
breast cancer.

At one hundred
pages a day, I
would be 1250
years old before
I reached the
And to further refine last page.
your results you can
select if you want to
see just research,
trials, videos, news
etc. To bring that
search down to single
digits.

[2]
Medstory.com’s technology has been
bought by Microsoft in order to
enhance their Live search offering,
available at HealthVault.com, and
offers similar refinements but in a
more consumer focused manner,
some medical students may find it to
be a helpful starting point for it’s
summary section on the front page
which displays the articles from sites
Microsoft thinks are worth visiting.
Search Medica doesn’t make
users miss out, featuring refinement
tools for selecting by category (e.g.
News, Signs and Symptoms,
Other Here’s some quick tips for what to
uses of do when you start researching a
search topic on the internet:
1. Start with a visual:
Image searches are a
really under used tool, make
the most of them by searching
for a disease when you first
hear about it, your mind will
fizz with the visual stimulation
of all those images giving you
clues- after all sight is an
important tool for doctors,
you’ll recognise Charcot-
Marie-Tooth syndrome 100
times faster in hospital if you
know the characteristic leg
shape it brings.
Starting your search this
way should make life that little
bit easier.
2. Scrapbooking:
Some sites like
Healthvault.com allow users to
make a “scrapbook” of their
Investigations etc) and also offers
recommended terms, sites and
concepts alongside their results to OTHER LAYOUTS:
help users narrow down searches
further- it’s worth noting that Search
Medica themselves searched for
medical students to recommend
websites when building their site so
the results are already pretty
appealing without these tools.
Search Medica‟s
suggestions appear with
sites, terms and
concepts on the left
hand side.
favourite results to return to
later. It’s dead simple but can
be great when you’ve found
something helpful the moment
before your mate knocks on The category selection
your door and requests your tool in Search Medica
allows you to narrow
company into town.
down results
Some may also find this immediately to the
useful for SSM periods and information you want.
revision.
3. Just go on Wikipedia:
Although unpopular with
some tutors wikipedia offers
one good thing- citations…
some Wikipedia user has
already done the leg work for
you! So skip the article and
look at the resource list for a
fast way to get the reliable info. Microsoft‟s Healthvault
may be consumer
orientated but offers
useful summaries from
the Mayo Clinic and
similar sites.
[3]
And now for the main event...

The basic commands Slightly more complex:

Any searcher worth their salt knows •„Site:‟: Allows you to determine
the following commands: where the results come from- e.g.
• “ ”: Looks for the exact phrase .ac limits results to pages like
between them. www.liv.ac.uk and www.man.ac.uk.
• -: excludes pages containing the • OR: allows more flexibility e.g.
word that follows it. Site:(.ac OR .edu) gives results
like www.liv.acuk and
www.stanford.edu

The commands above are the basics available in
almost any large search providers arsenal, to find more
you can look for their “search operators”- these can allow
you to find pages that have specific attributes- like having
RSS feeds, containing certain words in their titles etc. For
this demonstration however all you need are the
commands above to shrink that results list to a millionth
of its original size- the goal of this is to prove that it’s
possible and not to find the best result in the world, you’ll
probably get to that point before you hit this level of
result reduction.
To make the point I will use Live.com and search for
“Breast cancer” to start off, the result is a staggering 84.2
million results- so the goal is to get no more than 84
relevant results.
Step One: Removing the clutter.
Removing herbal remedies is a good start for this
topic, the search term is now:
breast cancer -herbal
..and this gives 50.8 million results, a 40% reduction
in results. Similar techniques allow us to remove other
terms such as “journal”, “homeopathy”, “campaign” etc,
giving us a search like the following:
breast Cancer -glossary -journal -herbal -
homeopathy -research -campaign
..making 26.2 million results.
Step Two: Setting limits.
Having removed all terms that “cluttered” my results,
I can now tell the engine where to look precisely, for my
needs an academic site is handy so I add the requirement
for all pages to be from “.ac.uk” sites:
Breast Cancer -glossary -journal -herbal -
research -campaign site:(.ac.uk)
And now I am down to 45,200 sites. Adding
quotation marks (“”) around “breast cancer” narrows this
down further to 30,800.
Step Three: Brushing up the results.
Now I have a clearer view of what the search engine
thinks I want, the next step is simply to get more specific
and add terms that I want more focus on, we’re all used to
doing this but if you do it too soon you could easily miss
out on some relevant results. Adding the terms pathology,
structure and function to the search returned 112 results.
From here 84 is a stones throw away and by adding
conditions like “-pdf” and “-dictionary” the final result is
73 results!
84,200,000 to 73 results
= 99.9999% result reduction
Just imagine how easy that would have been by using a
more specialised search engine!

ROUND HEALTHVAULT.COM MEDSTORY SEARCHMEDICA GOOGLE

UP

•Scrapbooking •42,000,000 results •51,249 results •45,700,000

•Highlights “useful” •By far the best in •Sites recommended results
articles refinements offered by medical students •Little
•Consumer focused •Simple layout •Refinements refinement
•No listed results number suggested offered

[4]