About Us

Medical Doctors | Dentists | Nurses | Medical Students | Health consumers/Patients

About Us

We review electronic medical information resources available in any of the following media: browsable WWW sites, or downloadable datasets and software, or on CD-ROMS. Our staff M.D.'s evaluate such resources, write reviews for medical Internet community, and classify resources by audiences targeted, types of material, medical specialties, and other search criteria.

Drrecommend provides some unique Medical and Internet specific features:

The Medical doctors who produce the Medical Review database work remotely over the Internet using regular browsers. Further, because of our translation capabilities, the MDs can enter information using using their native languages.

A comprehensive set of attributes which describes each medical site is provided to make queries more precise.
Specific, comprehensive categories can be used to "drill-down" to the desired site or information:
via health specialties;
via targeting audience;
via price range;
via reference index;
via quality rating;
via purpose (learning, simulation or reference); and
via multiple combinations of the above mentioned queries.
Keywords may also be combined with the above queries.

Through the use of our advanced Internet search technology, we provide query results from various Internet medical databases which do not store their data on static HTML pages. Generic Internet search engines are unable to access, and thus index, this data. Thus, this capability allows us to significantly enrich the results of user's queries, a feature greatly favored by users.

For developers and site contributors, we have created a multi-mode, user-friendly interface used to post or add new Web sites or information to our database. This interface allows Internet viewers to:
(1) interactively walk through the available categories and directories to find the desired information;
(2) use search capabilities within a particular category or set of categories;
(3) pose a user-friendly, multi-parameter query which has the same
functionality as approach (1), but takes less time to reach to the desirable information.

DrRecommend at www.polymedicine.com is currently using the 1st and 2nd interface capabilities. DoctorDigest is currently using the 2nd and 3rd interface capabilities. The 3rd interface capability is the most advanced interface and targets advanced Internet users.
Thus, we have produced an automated system with which multiple sets of Web pages can be created in various ways to access a particular topic of interest. This automation not only minimizes deployment time, it expands the ability to easily implement Internet users' personal interface preferences.

Like most search engines, our search engine can employ the use keywords to search for sites and information on the Internet. In addition, however, our site allows users to narrow their searches within a human selected knowledge category or combination of categories. This combination of the using a human selected category plus an automated keyword search gives significantly more precise results. More specifically, our engine searches:
- within the names and titles of Internet sites, as Yahoo does
- within the entire textual contents of Internet sites, as Altavista does
- using a combination of both of these approaches
- using these approaches along with category information
- using these features with the translation features mentioned above.

On our site, all links, both those on static pages and those which are the results of queries, are monitored in real time using our Live-Speed checking feature. Each time a page is opened or query results are displayed, this mechanism checks the status (i.e., is the link alive) and speed capability of each external link on the page. If the link is alive, a speedometer is displayed which indicates the current speed capability of the external site. Otherwise, a Stop sign is displayed.

This feature is particularly useful in reducing user frustration and saving valuable time when external sites are temporarily down or very slow as users can choose to focus on other links. All other Web sites and search engines force users to check for themselves whether are actually working.

If a Web site referenced in our database is temporarily down, users can be provided with the full textual content of the Web site, if desired.

A "Reference index" is periodically computed for each site and provided as additional information to users. This index is the number times the particular site is referenced by other sites. It is used to represent the site's level of visibility on the Web.