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Using Medical World Search

This is a guide to using Medical World Search and a description of Medical World Search's features. Medical World Search has a powerful, yet easy to use interface, and reading this document is not required for using Medical World Search. 

Sending Queries to Other Engines and Major Sites

In the initial design, MWsearch search engine adopts a philosophy of building a professionally selected and filtered "Major Site" database for our users to search for medical knowledge and information. We recognize that there are vast amount of medical web sites and databases existing which will take considerable resources and time to build the "Major Sites" from the existing data sources. Hence, we also adopted the strategy of sending our intelligent queries (expanded queries constructed with MWSearch's medical knowledge base) to other search engines and databases. The initial search box design,  therefore, contains a 'Major Site' and a number of other search engines, such as Pubmed MEDLINE, Altavista, Webcrawler, Infoseek, Hotbot and Google  in the pull-down menu for the users to select. In our early versions,  by default, the search action is "Search Major Sites" when we painstakingly constructed our Major Sites. For this selection, Medical World Search will use its detailed index of the major medical sites on the Web to select the sites that are the most relevant to your query. This option allows Medical World Search to fully use its thesaurus and sophisticated ranking of search results. However, the world wide web has expanded so rapidly, our professional staff could not keep up with the emerging medical web sites and databases to do a thorough review, selection and indexing on every worthy medical site's content. Very soon, we realized that the 'Major Site' must be maintained as a research project and it is not realistic for us to offer a 'Major Site' to cover all the developments in medical sciences, medicine and healthcare information as the sole source of medical search. Today, our design adopted the concept of sending your queries to other search engines and their huge databases. We do this with a split screen design so that you will be able to take full advantage of MWSearch's thesaurus engine and knowledge base, derive intelligent queries and send to your selected search databases to find results. This split screen design allows you to iteratively drill down deep into the medical knowledge domain and obtain the most accurate and relevant medical information to your queries. 

When Medical World Search sends your queries, after expanding them with reference to medical thesaurus, to other search engines such as Altavista, Google or Pubmed, the other search engine will run the queries against its own index of web sites and databases. This is a way of easily increasing the comprehensiveness of your search. However, the relevancy and accuracy of your search can only be improved by framing intelligent queries. Your queries sent to other search engines are automatically expanded or narrowed by using Medical World Search's thesaurus knowledge base. Medical terms are searched for as phrases and word groups. You do not need to know the search language of the other search engines, as Medical World Search will automatically formulate your query optimally. Since different search engines may have their own biases in selecting medical web sites, you can select different search database depending on what type of queries you may have. Medical information can be difficult to find particularly due to its special terminology. MWSearch offers a number of tools to support the user to engage an iterative but fruitful process to find the desired medical information. 

MWSearch is made simple for you to use. Type in your initial query terms, select an initial search database from the pull-down menu and then hit the button 'Go'. Then the screen will split in two, with the upper portion showing your query and its intelligently expanded search terms and the bottom portion showing the interface of your selected search database and the results from that search engine produced by the intelligently framed query from the upper screen. You can use the upper screen to produce different intelligent query strings and selectively combine or delete the terms to drill down deeper to the medical knowledge level you desire to find. In the MWSearch half screen, you will find other functions: Add Thesaurus Terms, Boolean Query, Tune Explosion and Show Query Terms which can assist you to frame your intelligent query iteratively till you get the right results.  

Features for Registered Users

You must submit the registration form with accurate information to allow system to validate userid and password for the registrant. Using our on-line secure credit card payment system is most convenient. Make sure you will submit or have submitted the registration form after or before you process the credit card payment. Payment of registration fee by bank check and money order in US currency is also acceptable. Please do indicate in the registration form of your payment method. Send us an email to confirm your registration with your userid indicated will eliminate any possibility of any human and system submission error. To register, go to the link marked "Registration" and fill in the registration form. If you entered the data correctly, you will get a message after submission that acknowledges that you are now a registered user.

When already registered, you can log in by going to the link marked "Login". After entering your user ID and password, you will be logged in.

When logged in as a registered user, you can use the following features:

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In addition, for materials from the Unified Medical Language System® of the National Library of Medicine , additional copyright restrictions apply. Use of this information service is subject to the disclaimer and the terms and conditions .