Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has changed how health professionals work with data and information. Developments in ICT enable us to store and access an almost unlimited volume of materials. This material is generally accessible from anywhere in the world. We are also increasingly less constrained by the way we access this. As personal computing devices become more powerful, PDAs, RSS feeds and social networking provide additional freedoms in how we interface and organise our resources. The growth in search engines and query matching processes also means that it is possible to find information more quickly. We can pursue areas of interest through immediate hyperlinks to other electronic resources.
What is the Web?
The Web, or more properly the World Wide Web, is part of the Internet. The Internet is a worldwide collection of computer networks that exchange data by using common standards called protocols. The Web is a shared space on the Internet that allows computers to use a common protocol, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), to access webpages via hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are direct links to another web page. They can be embedded in the text and by clicking on the link the user is taken to the new page. A web browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator is a software application that we use to interact with webservers and access documents on the Web.
Some usage characteristics
It is hard to know how large the Web is. One estimate suggests that it has over 11.5 billion pages. [1] Search Engine Watch reports that there are over 200 million searches each day. [2] There are likely to be over 100,000 health websites. [3]
Eysenbach and Kohler [4] have suggested that 4.5% of internet searches are health related. Given Google reports 150 million searches per day, this represents 6.75 million health related searches every day on Google alone.
Considerations in using the Web
There are things to consider when searching the Web. Firstly, the Web is an unregulated environment. Provided you can access the internet, it is possible to create a website. Unlike journals, websites and webpages may not have a peer review process. As there is no requirement to maintain a site, the information may be outdated. Material is often transient in that it can be moved or removed without notice, effectively ceasing to exist.
There are two drawbacks in using search engines on the Web. First, they do not directly assess the quality of sites and hence the materials retrieved. Second, searching is based on textwords rather than a library indexing system such as MeSH terms. This means that a search term may return many irrelevant items. Web searches can also return thousands of possible matches.
However, there are, many benefits. The Web contains information and materials that may not be able to be accessed in any other way. It enables access to and sharing of databases and datasets. There are also new applications for use in the web environment that can facilitate online dissemination and interaction [5] such as social bookmarking systems (del.icio.us) or social citations (CiteULike).
Finding out more
Related CareSearch pages
References
- Gulli A. Sigorini A The Indexable Web is more than 11.5 billion pages WWW 2005 May 10-14 Chiba, Japan
- Sullivan D Searches per Day Search Engine Watch, 20 April 2006
- Wilson P, How to find the good and avoid the bad or ugly: a short guide to tools for rating quality of health information on the internet BMJ. 2002 March 9; 324(7337): 598–602
- Eysenbach G, Kohler Ch 2003 What is the prevalence of health-related searches on the World Wide Web? Qualitative and quantitative analysis of search engine queries on the internet. AMIA Annu Symp Proc.225-9
- Boulos MN, Maramba I, Wheeler S. Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education BMC Med Educ. 2006 Aug 15;6:41.
This page was created on 30 April and is due for review in April 2010
Last updated 12 June 2008