Consumer's Reports - Finding Medical Help Online

General Sites

American Medical Association

A useful site with links to consumer health information, vast AIDS information center, searchable database of more than 650,000 U.S. physicians.

Medicine Net

Content rich commercial site includes interactive groups, ask-the-doctor feature, medical dictionary, comprehensive drug information, medical news, disease-specific information, and links.

Medscape

Searchable commercial collection of full-text articles fromsuch useful sources as the National Institutes of health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

OncoLink

Huge collection of cancer information and links based at the University of Pennslyvania. The best starting place we found for cancer information.

ParentsPlace

Not health-only, but this commercial site contains many pages of sophisticated, reader-friendly information on children's health issues.

Thrive.

Time-Warner site with full-text articles from professional and consumer publications.

Links Only

Hardin Meta Directory of Internet Health Sources

"We list the sites that list the sites", says Hardin's home page. Based at University of Iowa. An index of sites that, in turn, contain links to other sites.

Medical matrix

Physician-maintained commercial database of annotated health links. Oriented toward medical professionals, but accessible to an educated lay person. A keyword search gets you to a subject index, from which you navigate to the links you want.

Medicine Specific Search Engines

• Health A to Z
• Achoo

General Search Engines

Alta Vista

(URL is <URL:http://www.altavista.digital.com> ) is probably the most powerful web searching facility at this time, with an exhaustive database and the capability to search USENET newsgroups as well as web sites. The query language is also powerful.

Yahoo

(URL is <URL:http://www.yahoo.com/> ) is probably the most complete hierarchical, topical index of web sites, and also features a sophisticated search facility.

Lycos

(URL is <URL:http://www.lycos.com> ) is another web-indexing robot, which includes the ability to submit the URLs of your own documents by hand, ensuring that they are available for searching.

WebCrawler

(URL is <URL:http://webcrawler.com.html> ) builds an impressively complete index; on the other hand, since it indexes the content of documents, it may find many links that aren't exactly what you had in mind. However, it does a good job of sorting the documents it finds according to how closely they match your search. http://wwww.cs.colorado.edu/wwww

World Wide Web Worm

(URL is http://wwww.cs.colorado.edu/wwww ) builds its index based on page titles and URL contents only. This is somewhat less inclusive, but pages it finds are more likely to be an exact match with your needs.

InfoSeek

<URL:http://www.infoseek.com/> is a commercial search service which also offers a free web search facility <URL:http://www2.infoseek.com>. You can specify phrases to locate, among other query operations, and InfoSeek's commercial service can search more than just web pages (newsgroups, for instance). InfoSeek's commercial service charges 10 cents per query and offers a free trial to new users. (Increasing load on the free search servers makes this sound better every day.)

OpenText

(URL is <URL:http://www.opentext.com> ) also offers a robust web searching facility.

Excite

URL is <http://www.excite.com>.

Hotbot

URL is <http://www.hotbot.com>.

Magellan

URL is <http://www.mckinley.com>.