Complementary Alternative Cardiovascular Medicine

266 Alternative Cardiovascular Medicine
Table 7
Search Engines
As search engine technology has become sophisticated, the commercial sites
have become increasingly savvy about ensuring that their site gets a high
ranking. The latest strategy is for commercial sites to “trade links” so they all
increase their number of hits. Latest generation search engines, such as Google,
use a search algorithm that works like citation analysis to identify “authoritative”
sites. Unfortunately, authoritative has come to mean “popular,” as more
commercial sites jointly generate hits. Most serious and truly authoritative
educational, governmental, and nonprofit sites do not play the game of
increasing their ranking, so they may come lower down the listing of hits.
Nevertheless, Google (http://www.google.com) is still the fastest and most
powerful search engine currently available, and any of the search engines, using
automated search strategies, including natural language queries (such as Ask
Jeeves, Alta Vista, HotBot, and All the Web), are generally superior to subject
directories, such as Yahoo!, Lycos, or Magellan.
A new search engine, Scirus (http://www.scirus.com), developed for Elsevier
Science, may be worth exploring. It is science specific, so it focuses only on
Web sites containing scientific or biomedical data. It locates peer-reviewed
articles and offers a document delivery service.
Metasearch engines, such as Metacrawler, Search.Com, Northern Light,
and Dogpile, query several search engines simultaneously and generate an
enormous number of hits. The problem is that they may have reduced relevance
if one of the included search engines returns results with low relevance.