The efficacy of using search engines in procuring information about orthopaedic foot and ankle problems from the World Wide Web

This study has attempted to demonstrate the feasibility of obtaining inform ation specific to foot and ankle orthopaedics from the World Wide Web (WWW) , Six search engines (Lycos, AltaVista, Infoseek, Excite, Webcrawler, and H otBot) were used in scanning the Web for the following key words: "cavus fo ot," "diabetic foot," "hallux valgus," and "pes equinovarus," Matches were classified by language, provider, type, and relevance to medical profession als or to patients. Sixty percent (407 sites) of the visited websites conta ined information intended for use by physicians and other medical professio nals; 30% (206 sites) were related to patient information; 10% of the sites were not easily classifiable, Forty-one percent (169 sites) of the website s were commercially oriented homepages that included advertisements.