Search systems and medical data quoting from the internet.

The Internet as a new medium also has its use in medicine. Plenty of information which can be found on the world computer network, needs an efficient searching as well as an evaluation system and quoting of the information obtained. Twelve most popular search engines were chosen--9 general: Netscape, Altavista, HotBot, Goggle, Northern Light, Magellan, Infoseek, MSN; 2 specialized medical search engines: Medscape and Medline; and one Croatian search engine: Cross. The efficiency of searching was observed by analyzing the number of obtained pages, their contents and examples of the quoted references from the Internet. The searching was done using the mentioned search engines, and results varied from 2,189,793 network pages found on the Infoseek for the term 'skin cancer' to 0 pages with the search engine Cross for the term 'melanoma+therapy'. When comparing the results for a single term using various search engines, it is concluded that the number of pages varied because of different databases and specialized scooters that search and make indexes. It is possible to use logical operators and more advanced search systems with the majority of search engines. The quoting system is based on mentioning the names of the author and his work, the access date and url (uniform resource locator) addresses of the network pages. Permanent and reliable access to quotations could not be established with previous quotation systems. Dermatologic terms have been well dealt with concerning general population, whereas professionals are recommended to use Medline and reviewed web pages. There have been very few professional and professionally relevant and comprehensive pages on the Internet relative to the total of web pages.