Searching

Page Indexing

All pages, forums postings, news articles and events are automatically indexed word by word when added to the site. They are therefore immediately available for searching.

Results are returned with a brief synopisis of the content of the page or article.

Web Searching

The LemLink general and medical search pages incorporate an intelligent meta search engine - ie it searches a number of sites / databases and collates the results.
This is available on all LemLink sites.

So, for example, if you search for Cystic Fibrosis, the server gets the results of searching for Cystic Fibrosis from its own database as well as from Yahoo Web SItes, Yahoo Web Pages (= Google), eMedicine, the NEVDGP site, MedicineAu, FindArticles.com (health), and MedLine via PubMed.

(The General Web search searches only Yahoo Web Sites and Yahoo Web Pages (= Google) and its own database)

This is why it takes about 30 secs to return the answers. Note that this is quicker than you can search each site as the server has very high speed Internet access.

What's more, when a site is selected from the combined list shown to the searcher, it is added to the LemLink database and promoted up the order.

So, the next time someone searches for Cystic Fibrosis, the top choices in the list will be those chosen by other doctors.

In this way, the database gets smarter as more people use it.

Also, when a searcher next returns to the search engine, it will ask him to categorise and rate the site that they last visited, to further improve the relevance of the database.

If anyone has suggestions for other databases they would like to add to the meta-search or any comments I would be very interested.

We could set it up to allow readers to see the most popular search terms, and the most popular visited sites, if anyone is interested.