Class One: Finding Online Health Information: Search Engines
Search Engines
Google and Altavista are two popular search engines. Search engines use spiders (computer tools) to search the web and mathematical formulas to determine what order (or rank) the web sites will appear in the results list. The search engines use different formulas to determine the rank. If you compare the first page of the same search on Google and Altavista (say you are looking for diabetes information) you may see different web sites listed. Google might give a different ranking score to the web sites on its first page than Altavista did. Remember this when you use search engines.
- Google http://www.google.com
- Tips for searching Google
- Altavista http://www.altavista.com/
- Tips for searching Altavista
Google and Altavista allows companies to pay for advertising; the web sites that pay advertising fees show up at the top of the search screen or in the right hand column, and are labeled as a "Sponsored Link" or "Sponsored Matches".
To learn more about search engines, see the article on Search Engine Watch How Search Engines Work.
Go on to Search Directories.
