Tomorrow's Pharmacist October 1999 p70-73
Edited by Pamela Mason

The internet

How to surf effectively

Browsers, search engines and uniform resource locators. Do you know what these terms mean? This article explains how to get the most from the internet.

There is no doubt that the internet is now the access portal to a vast array of valuable and otherwise almost impossible to find information. The shear volume of information is, perhaps, the biggest hurdle to the harnessing of the Internet to useful purposes, especially when considering specialist information such as required by healthcare professionals.

History

The movement of reference sources to electronic media publishing started more than 10 years ago. The early resources were mostly electronic copies of their paper equivalents and offered little in extra functionality or depth. These early resources were sometimes difficult to use and not very intuitive. Very soon, however, users requested more efficient methods of getting quickly to the data of interest and the development of more efficient and easy to use "browsers" started.
The quickening pace of healthcare products development and available treatments necessitated more frequent updating of reference sources than the typical two or three year reprint cycle which was the norm for printed reference works. This call for increased frequency of releases prompted changes to the methods and procedures employed to produce the publications. The move to electronic authoring and editing could allow more frequent updates than was economically sensible or possible with paper. Quarterly and even monthly updates of references were initiated and are now expected. Alongside the move to more frequent updates came the immediate problem of managing the dissemination of the updates and controlling their implementation within the end user systems. For example, some updates need to overwrite existing guidance or information because of the release of the latest research data or discontinuation of a particular product, and it is important that the end user system takes account of this when implementing the update.
As more and more resources have been structured into electronic media, it has been necessary to continue to develop and refine the search programs and browsers, which enable the information to be easily found and viewed. Unfortunately, until very recently, there were many different search or browser mechanisms, each requiring a different set of instructions and each requiring a deal of expertise in order to gain the most useful information most quickly. Each required a different "language" or syntax of instructions and some of the earlier examples were bizarre in their instruction sets. An example of the early type of search engine was the interface to Dialog services provided by Radio Suisse, which required the entry of unique code preceded by two full stops. This "dot dot" language was second nature to those employed in corporate information centres or libraries but was a "black art" to the occasional user. The larger suppliers and distributors of electronic resources such as Silver Platter produced their own search and browser engine "WinSpirs", which was supplied as part of the subscription to their services. While these large suppliers had access to many of the useful resources around the world, there were many that preferred to stay independent and used their own parochial search mechanisms, presenting difficulties for the end user. In the early days, therefore, one needed expertise in at least three or four of the searching mechanisms in order to find the information sought. Fortunately all has changed or is changing.

The internet

While this was going on, a quiet - actually, not so quiet - revolution was going on in the world of the internet. An explosion of users all wishing to search for information on a plethora of interests prompted the world's largest players to hop on the bandwagon and develop technologies to more easily accomplish these searches. Internet sites were set up to aid users in seeking the information they required (eg, Alta vista, HotBot, Yahoo, Lycos, etc). It was not long before these gateways to the information and the information sources themselves saw the opportunity of commercial return by marketing products or services on the search pages and also by the information providers using sophisticated techniques to lead you to their site. Some more dubious sites even registered common misspellings of the names of commonly accessed big name sites such as Microsoft, IBM and the like in order that a mis-spelt address took you to their site often promoting something less ethical!
In order to find the information of interest, you must have some understanding of how sites are addressed. Each page of information has a unique Uniform Resource Locator or URL - a hierarchical address of the specific location of a page. Each site is organised with a top level page or "home" page which is the page sought as the default by the user's browser. This "home" page is always addressed in the form: www.abcdef.com/index.htm, enabling the browser to look for incidence of "index". Other pages in the site are linked directly or indirectly to this index page.
If sites were found simply by their URLs, however, then life would be difficult. Why? As the number of new sites increases at a huge rate, the search for new site names becomes more difficult, as each must be unique. Uniqueness of the URLs is maintained by national and international agreements, policed by bodies properly resourced (by registration fees) bodies. For example, let us say that I have a new product, the "XWID2" to launch by my company called "Fred's Widgets Ltd". The logical name (URL) for my company site might be www.freds.com. (com=a commercial site). It is most unlikely that such a URL is still available, and I would probably have to be content with something like www.fredswiglimited.co.uk . How on earth would people find my company, or more especially my new product?
A method of searching for the content of the sites was therefore required. There are a number of methods used to achieve "hits" when users search the Internet for information. The most common is the use of "met tags". These tags are keywords attached at the head of each page (but not normally displayed by the browser), supposedly giving information regarding the content of the page. I would simply add met tags for XWID2, the new product name, freds, widgets and whatever other keywords might help me gain "hits". The search engine supposedly looks at these tags as matches for your required information. I say supposedly, since manipulation of these tags allows more dubious sites to appear as "hits" when you search for apparently unrelated information. For example, you wish to search for information about dogs and which breeds make good pets. This is a fairly common type of search. You use a search engine (see below) and search on the words "pet dog". What you will not know is that a site promoting "adult" material has incorporated "dog" as a met tag on one or more of its pages. The site may have little or nothing to do with pet dogs, but because the site promoters have found that searches for "pet dogs" are common, they include the required met tags in their pages, to ensure hits by the search engines. Their site then appears as one of the choices for you to visit. The incidence of tag hits is one method by which the order of sites is presented to the user.

Search engines

Search engines are sites specifically set up to search for information on the Internet. Which search engine should you use? I recommend that new users should concentrate upon learning the most efficient use of one or two of the better engines with wide and international coverage such as Alta Vista or Yahoo. All of the search engines provide on-line help and most a tutorial. [www.altavista.com/av/content/help.htm] A growing number of new sites offer a "search of searches" facility. These sites (eg, The Spider's Apprentice [www.monash.com/spidap.html]) provide a facility to search across a number of search engines from one place together with useful hints and tips for use of the individual search engines.
Another source of useful pointers to sites covering a particular topic is the emergence of "resource discs", listing sites with similar content or particular focus. Several such discs are now becoming available for healthcare topics. By loading a CD-ROM one is given a directory of sites which one can then view in pursuit of the information required. While these "resource discs" can be valuable in short circuiting difficult searches, it is necessary to be aware of potential bias toward particular views or particular products, especially if the resource discs are given away as part of new product launches or other marketing activity.

Browsers

The internet has overtaken many other methods in the provision of more general information such as travel and consumer information to a much expanded audience. Huge effort has been diverted toward providing an easy to use and intuitive user interface, refined many times in the last few years. Dependence upon this easy to use interface to provide commercially valuable (and often paid for) information has fuelled this effort, with the rapid expansion of the internet as a portal to electronic commerce. The "internet browsers" (such as Netscape, Internet Explorer) interface has now become the industry standard when looking for, and viewing information. In addition, this interface now pervades the latest in applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, etc (eg, MS Office 2000). Many of the existing information providers have already restructured information to provide compatibility with this interface and dropped more proprietary interfaces. The latest technology enables the browser to both view and manage structured data and, additionally, facilitates different views of shared data, tailored for different users and varying requirements. Significant widening of the use of internet browsers demands that any information seeking professional should be fully conversant with efficient use of at least one of the products.

Information reliability

Care must be exercised in relaying information sourced from the internet to others who may come to rely upon it without due diligence. If you are unsure of the provenance of information sourced in this way, you must declare the source attached to the information. There are several ways, however, to enhance your confidence in the information that you source from the internet:

• Seek the same information from two or more different sites. If the information is the same, then its reliability is higher
• Use sites known to maintain high content standards such as university sites, manufacturer sites (beware of commercial bias) and sites of professional bodies (www.bma.org.uk., www.rpsgb.org.uk, www.npa.co.uk, etc)
• Use sites with restricted access - those which require you to log into them with a user identity and password, which is normally only given after checking your personal credentials. In some cases you may have to provide status credentials such as qualifications or registration details. In other cases, such as NHSNet you may have to comply with a code of connection before access is granted and the level of access will be based upon the information that you provide.

In order to make best use of the information from both the internet and other resources, you must be competent in:

• The most efficient mechanisms for searching for the information that you require. This is significant, especially with more specialist resources and cannot be accomplished without practice or even, perhaps, formal training. At the very least, investment in time taken to follow a tutorial or training package will be rewarded with a payback in efficiency, depth and scope of the information received
• The appraisal and interpretation of the information and its relevance to the issues in question. The provenance of the information is important if you are to pass the information on to a third party, since you may be called to account for its accuracy.

Mr Shepherd is head, information technology policy unit, Royal Pharmaceutical Society

Tomorrow's Pharmacist is an annual publication produced within the editorial department of The Pharmaceutical Journal