The problem is that much of that Internet information is either incomplete or just plain wrong. That’s the conclusion of an article published on Medscape Today. Here are excerpts:

The Internet puts solid health information at a patient’s fingertips, but 2 new studies suggest that too many of those fingertips stray into questionable territory.

In a survey from Wolters Kluwer Health, 78% of physicians said that lack of time is one of the most common challenges for physician-patient communication. The next biggest problem in this regard — cited by 53% of physicians — is misinformed patients.

The phone survey, conducted in August, included more than 300 US physicians, roughly split between primary care physicians and specialists.

The survey sheds more light on the increasingly larger role — for good and ill — that the Internet plays in healthcare. The Pew Research Center reports that 78% of adults use the Internet, and of these, 83% look up health information online.

However, the value of that information is debatable. While just over half (53%) of physicians in the Wolters Kluwer Health survey said that easier access by patients to medical knowledge has improved the exam-room experience, 1 in 5 said that this easier access “has been detrimental, leading to misinformation and incorrect self-diagnosis.”

Similar misgivings emerged in a study presented by Cleveland Clinic Foundation researchers at the annual scientific meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) that ended this week. The researchers analyzed the 100 most-viewed YouTube videos on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and rated their overall educational quality as poor.

“Clinicians and their patients need to be aware of misleading information posted by patients or particularly by pharmaceutical companies who often post videos to make it seem like they are coming from a patient when in actuality it is a company advertisement,” said researcher Saurabh Mukewar, MD, in an ACG press release. “These sources are not transparent.”

“The Internet and social media are not going away — YouTube is a powerful platform to deliver and receive healthcare information,” said Dr. Mukewar, an internal medicine resident at the Cleveland Clinic. “But healthcare providers and professional societies need to provide more educational and efficient materials using this powerful tool to counteract misleading information.”

What is Wordnik?

Wordnik is a place for all the words, and everything known about them.

Our goal is to show you as much information as possible, as fast as we can find it, for every word in English, and to give you a place where you can make your own opinions about words known.

Traditional dictionaries make you wait until they’ve found what they consider to be “enough” information about a word before they will show it to you. Wordnik knows you don’t want to wait—if you’re interested in a word, we’re interested too!

By “information,” we don’t just mean traditional definitions (although we have plenty of those)! This information could be:

• An example sentence—we have tons of examples and gobs of other data for most words. But even if we’ve only found one sentence, we’ll show it to you. And we’ll show you where it came from.

• Related words: not just synonyms and antonyms, but words that are used in the same contexts. Cheeseburger, milkshake, and doughnut aren’t synonyms, but they show up in the same kinds of sentences.

• Images tagged by our friends at Flickr: want to know what a pout looks like? We’ll show you.

• Statistics: how rare is tintinnabulation? Well, we think you’ll see it only about once a year. Smile? You might see that word many times, every day.

• An audio pronunciation—and you can record your own!

• Something YOU tell us! Use the “Comments” and “Contribute” links to tell us something—anything—about a word.

AreaCode.org is an area codes locator and comprehensive directory of area codes across the United States. Find information on each area code, including coverage area and local dialing instructions. Coverage area is shown with an area code map and list of cities within each code. Other relevant information for telephone area codes is detailed in the comments section. Use AreaCode.org for area code lookup, area code search, and as an area code finder. You could say that AreaCode.org takes the code out of telephone area code.

About 123people

123people is a real time people search tool
that looks into nearly every corner of the Web. Using our proprietary
search algorithm, you can find comprehensive and centralized people
related information consisting of images, videos, phone numbers, email
addresses, social networking and Wikipedia profiles and much more. All
of this rich media profile content is pulled from an extensive list of
international as well a regional relevant sources. 123people is also a
social activity that applies crowd wisdom. Users can add information to
every single search result, giving it more relevance with details that
are yet not found in the Internet. This takes the quality of people
search to the next level.

Welcome to Cuil—the world’s biggest search engine. The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too.

The
Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search
engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web
than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as
Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics,
Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance.
When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and
analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their
inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer
you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want
and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web
rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect
data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil,
your search history is always private.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.

It’s called ChunkIt and it’s a FREE browser search tool you can add to your Web page to make searching easier on every Web site. For example, if you are searching for something specific or with multiple search terms that’s not coming up in your searches, ChunkIt pulls up the "chunk" of the page that mentions all your search terms together and highlights them, without you having to click on one link at a time to find the result you are looking for. ChunkIt makes it quick and easy to find exactly what you are looking for instead of wasting time digging through countless words, pages and links. Below is a link to the ChunkIt Cool Examples page where you can see more details about how this helps you to search any documents and Web sites online, and where you can also download it and try it out.  http://www.tigerlogic.com/ChunkIt/sec-edgar-chunkit.html