HEALTH ON THE NET AUTOMATED DATABASE OF HEALTH AND MEDICAL INFORMATION

With the number of World Wide Web sites growing every day, the problem is not just to find information, but to locate the right piece of inf ormation. Current World Wide Web search engines have not resolved this problem as they most often return a long list of documents. The searc h result is then unusable because of the large number of answers from different domains and topics. Only complex queries may, in a given sit uation, produce a limited number of potentially relevant documents. To make searches more efficient and usable by common users, we now need intelligent and specialised search engines on the Net [1,2]. Health On the Net Foundation and the Molecular Imaging and Bioinformatics Labor atory at Geneva University Hospital have developed Multi-Agent Retriev al Vagabond on Information Networks (MARVIN), a robot that searches si tes and documents specifically related to a given specialised field. O ne such robot has already been implemented and used for the medical an d the 2D electrophoresis domains. Health On the Net Foundation has imp lemented the corresponding search engines, MedHunt (http://www.hon.ch/ cgi-bin/find) for the medical field and 2DHunt (http://www.hon.ch/cgi- bin/2DHunt/find) for the 2D electrophoresis field. (C) 1997 Elsevier S cience B.V.