Before You Begin Searching the WWW Information Searching Practicum for First Year Medical Students. The Web is a way of accessing and finding Internet files or resources through computer recognized protocols. It is the multimedia, graphical, and hyperlinked portion of the Internet, and the most popular feature of the Internet today. It is not, however, all the Internet has to offer. The Web is based on a technology called hypertext, began in the early 1990s, and is always changing.
Some sites archives their content, but for most the content is always changing.
The article presents an overview of the Internet's history, provides a glossary of terminology involved, discusses common Internet applications, and how to connect to the Internet. They state that they wrote the article because their previous survey found that few hospital pharmacists were using the Internet. Interestingly enough, they somewhat reverse themselves in Part 2 by cautioning users about the accuracy of the information contained on the Internet. The authors do not advocate avoidance of the Internet, but instead recommend using reputable websites - pages created and evaluatedby health care professionals, universities, and government agencies. The investigators submitted the same group of questions to the sci.med.pharmacy newsgroup from different e-mail accounts and directed the same group of questions to randomly selected DICs in an effort to compare the responses given.