A Comparison of the Precision of General and Specialized Medical Search Engines in Medical Images Retrieval

The huge volume of information and images on the Internet and its increasing growth has made the optimized search performance difficult for users. Among search tools, search engines are mostly used by users. This research was aimed to determine and compare the precision of general and specialized search engines in medical images retrieval.

This applied, comparative approach survey was conducted in 2011. The research sample included 2 general search engines, i.e. Yahoo and Google, and 2 specialized medical search engines, i.e. OmniMedicalSearch and Trip Database. In order to determine and compare the precision of image retrieval in the four search engines, 10 medical keywords were chosen after consulting medical specialists and were searched in the mentioned search engines. Then the first 10 results retrieved by each search engine were extracted and the opinions of medical specialists about relevance of results were received. Descriptive statistics, Independent t-test were used to analyze the data with SPSS.

It was found that Google search engine has the most precision (90) in retrieving of relevant medical images and then OmniMedicalSearch search engine has precision to be equal 86/8. Among general search engines and specialized medical search engines there aren’t meaningful differences in retrieval of medical images.

Despite of some overlap between search engines results, each search engine also was retrieved unique results. This matter indicate that the indexing algorithm of resources on the web different in the various search engines; and it is suggested to use several general and specialized search engines simultaneously to search medical images.