Medicine on the Invisible Web [poster/paper]

Author: Jiří Menoušek,  Louny Hospital - Scientific Information Centre, Czech Republic

Fulltexts

Abstract

The term "invisible web" was used for the first time in 1994 by an American specialist Jill Ellsworth.. She used this expression for that sort of information which was not accessible by using search engines of that time.

Nowadays the Internet is divided into two parts – on the one hand the visible and surface web and on the other hand as many as 500 times bigger and invisible, opaque or deep web. Exactly on it there are placed a lot of valid medical data.

In addition to technical causes there are many other reasons which make some information difficult to obtain. It has been an increasing rate of noise ratio and insufficient search engine optimalization of documents with special medical data.

The author gives the list of five gates into the invisible web:

• the 1st gate – usage of some functions of common search engines
• the 2nd gate – usage of some specialized (medical) databanks
• the 3rd gate – usage of some specialized (medical) search engines
• the 4th gate – usage of some links indexes for the invisible documents
• the 5th gate – usage of the monitorship over several forms of the on-line discourse among medical experts ( groups of www users, e-mail conferences, chats, etc.)

The part of this presentation are some links to several sources of "invisible" medical data.

About the author