Comparative Study on Selected Search Engines & Meta Search Engines in Retrieving Physiotherapy Information from the World Wide Web & Determining Overlap between Them Survey

Introduction: Search tools including Search Engines, Meta Search Engines and Subject Directory are used to find the needed information in the World Wide Web. The aim of this study was to compare selected Search Engines and Meta Search Engines in retrieving information concerning physiotherapy from the World Wide Web to determine overlap among them.Methods: The current study was carried out using descriptive comparative methods. Seven search engines and seven meta search engines introduced by ";searchinginewatch.com"; as the most frequently used ones, were analyzed. Then subject sub category of physiotherapy in eight subject fields were chosen from Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) as keywords. After choosing keywords, a search was made via using the search and Meta search engines to identify how many results could be obtained by studied search engines for each individual keyword. Finally the rate of overlap among search engines and meta search engines was measure in terms of percentage. The obtained data were then analyzed using descriptive methods and the SPSS.Results: According to the result of this study, ";Altavista";, All the web ";and";Google"; showed the higher most retrieved results. Among the Meta search engines ";Ixquick"; got the first rank. Search results of ";Altavista"; and ";all the web";,"; Vivsimon"; and ";Clusty"; and ";Metacrawler"; and ";Dogpile"; showed large overlaps. Moreover, overlap percentage between search engines and Meta search engines with respect to keyword, was determined in this study.Conclusion: In this study, the percentage of overlap among selected search engines and meta search engines using the selected keywords, was shown to be 40% - 60% . This difference was because of variety of results ranking methods in different search engines and Meta search engines.Keywords: Medical Information Storage and Retrieval; Physical Therapy (Specialty); Internat