QDIS Blog

I became aware of a unique search site recently that I wanted to let you know about. It is CrossEngine and it allows you to search a given site and then immediately go to another site and perform the same search. It is organized first by type of information; quick, web, images, video, audio, news, etc. Then you have a search text box to type in your query. After that, you choose your search engine.

After that, if you want to see the results from a different search engine, just click on a new search engine and the same query will be run on the new search engine and the results displayed. I personally like this as I always recommend checking at least two major sites for any serious search activities.

As an example, I recently wanted to know about the Salmonella in Pater Pan peanut butter for a future posting here. I went to CrossEngine chose the News tab from the top. Then I typed in “Peter Pan” peanut butter Salmonella and then choose Google. I can look down thru the results and I even found an article from my alma mater college paper the Purdue Exponent.

I then wanted to see what else there was so just clicked on Yahoo and I get their news listings for the same query. The first listing showed me that it wasn’t only Peter Pan brand but also Great Value peanut butter. I then clicked on NY Times and found they had two articles, one on the peanut butter problem and other related to Salmonella problems with cantaloupe which mentions the peanut butter problem also. CrossEngine allows me to quickly and easily with very few clicks, look at the results on different search sites.

My only real concern as a power user is that not all the search engines use the same syntax for advanced searching. As an example, inurl: works on most but not all the web search sites. In Wisenut it defaults to searching for the word following inurl instead since Wisenut doesn’t support searching in specific fields. This isn’t a big deal for the vast majority of users and really isn’t a problem.

Since I do a lot of science related searching, I’d like to see them add a tab at the top to search science specific sites. I have sent them a list of my favorite science search sites (for more on this see my latest podcast Science Search Sites) and hope to see this incorporated in the future.

Overall, I like CrossEngine and it has replaced many of my bookmakrks on my web browser window. I use it to quickly look across various sites without having to retype my query. I had previously used bookmarklets to achieve this but there had to be a different bookmarklet for each engine. I like this approach much better. I always recomend checking at least two sites and CrossEngine makes that very easy.

Technorati Tags: CrossEngine

Email Ed Vawter

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I thought readers might be interested in my most recent podcast discussing science search sites on the internet. I also know of many chemistry sites but in this podcast I keep it more general for a broader audience. All of these are useful to folks looking for science or chemistry information.

I have more links of interest to chemist here.

Take a listen to the podcast and let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags: podcast, podcasting, science search sites, searching the internet

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I’ve mentioned Govtrack recently and wanted to highlight what a great resource I think it is. If you want to track and be alerted to specific bills, then this site makes it easy, especially with RSS feeds (web feeds).

Here is a search for all bills containing “drug OR pharmaceutical” in the House of the 110th Congress with any status.

GovTrack: Bill Search House (drug OR pharmaceutical)

This contains links to the full text of bills of 11 bills.

Here is the corresponding Senate bills.

GovTrack: Bill Search Senate (drug OR pharmaceutical)

The Senate currently only has 6 bills before it at this time. Both these links should continue to work and give you all the bills at later dates.

You can also use topics set up by the Congressional Research service (CRS) to monitor topic. As an example, here is the link for the topic Medicines. There is also an RSS feed (web feed).

I encourage everyone who has an interest in what Congress is doing to us this resource.

Technorati Tags: drug cost, drug imports, drug price, Government Information, Govtrack

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I am working on the next full episode of my podcast Searching the Internet and came across a new (at least new to me) site called Become.com. This allows you to find information on a great variety of product and where they are available online. It has a nice interface that allows you to refine your initial search by color or brand or store or price. I’ve found it useful and easy to use. They claim to cover 3.2 billion pages of products and information on a wide range of items.

You can get an overview of all the services they offer. I’ve found it very useful and wanted to let others know about it now that were are in the middle of the holiday shopping season.

Technorati Tags: Become.com, shopping

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Voting is an important duty for everyone in the US. I also think people should spend time going over the issues and candidates in order to make an informed choice. With that in mind, I wanted to let you know about what is easily the most important episode of “Searching the Internet” that I have done to date. Episode 12 covers information for voters and I review sites to help you make intelligent decisions in the upcoming election. All the sites reviewed are non-partisan and give unbiased information about the candidates and issues. I’m hopeful that people will find this review of election and voter information related sites useful and helpful.

I feel voting is very important and wanted to contribute something to the podcasting community. I went through many sites before settling on the ones I decided to include. Episode 012 covers election information sites. These include:

• Yahoo News Midterm Elections 2006
• C-SPAN
• CNN America Votes 2006
• Fair Vote
• getvoting411.us
• League of Women Voters
• Vote411.org
• Electionline
• Elections 2006
• Factcheck.org
• Media Matters for America
• Politics1.com
• Project Vote Smart
• RealClearPolitics
• Election Protection 365
• Election Incident Reporting System
• Electroral-Vote.com
• Election Projection - 2006 Edition
• Clusty Results for 2006 Midterm Election
• Mooter Results for 2006 Midterm Election

I feel voting is the most important duty of any American and I hope this episode helps people make informed decision at the polls on Nov 7.

Technorati Tags: election, vote, voting

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Lately, it seems that more and more drugs are coming under scrutiny for possibly increasing the risk of heart problems. The latest is Evista (raloxifene), an osteoporosis drug.

Breast cancer drug’s ties to heart ailments explored

The title itself is confusing. First, Evista has been shown in the study quoted to reduce the likely hood of developing breast cancer. The article also mentions Nolvadex (tamoxifen) which I’ve posted on before which has been shown to be less effective than Evista.

Here’s the quote from the article:

After about six years, women who had taken the drug were 44 percent more likely to have had a blood clot than were those in the placebo group and 49 percent more likely to have died from a stroke — each translating to about one more instance per 1,000 women treated each year. Overall, the two groups had heart problems at the same rate (533 events such as heart attacks and heart failure).

As I always state, all drugs, even over-the-counter drugs, have risks associated with them. The key is does the benefit outweigh the risk. This is always the case but it rarely gets thought out. Patients may not know the risks and doctors don’t often talk about the side-effects and risks.

I always recommend that patients read the full prescribing information (aka patient package insert) for any medication you are taking. While this may take some effort on some folks part, it is definitely worth it.

The first place to look for the prescribing information (if it doesn’t come with your prescription) is on the website for the medication or the company that produces it. As an example, I would try the following:

www.evista.com

This does indeed bring up the correct website for Evista.

You can also look at the Eli Lilly company website (they are the makers of Evista).

Also, the FDA website has a lot of information for approved drugs. You can find them at Drugs@FDA, and then give at least three letters for the drug and it will give you information on it although the prescribing information isn’t always included.

Technorati Tags: Evista, raloxifene, Tamoxifen

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I wanted to mention that Chmoogle, due to pressure from Google’s legal department has changed their name back to eMolucules. The Chmoogle address will now redirect you to the eMolecules site. For those of you not familiar with it, it allows you to do chemical structure, substructure, and name searching via the web. It is not nearly as large as Chemical Abstracts but it is free and does a very good job in my opinion. I like it because they have direct links to suppliers for chemicals so you can use it to find suppliers. You can also use the substructure search to find related molecules.

If you have a need for chemical name and structure searching, then eMolecules is the palce for you.

Technorati Tags: chemical structures, eMolecules

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I am always interested in new resources related to chemistry on the Internet. I am always looking for quick way to do structure searching since the commercial databases that offer this tends to be quite expensive. There are a couple that I’m sure most people are familiar with such as Chemfinder from Cambridgesoft or ChemIDplus from the NIH.

A newer one (or at least it’s new to me) is Chembank from Harvard. They have a fairly sizable database (over 466 thousand compounds). There is a variety of way to search but I found the substructure search to be easy to use and fairly quick. It gives you a nice Java based molecular editor to draw your substructure.

Here is a sample results for a search I performed.

You can also export the result in either tab delimited text or as an sdf file.

Clicking on a compound gives you detailed information.

My only compliant is that it doesn’t list which libraries these compounds come from. It merely states they are from vendor libraries and FDA approved drugs. It would be nice to know more about which libraries are included and if the database is going to continually updated.

While it isn’t as large as commercial databases, Chembank is a good place to go if you need to do some structure searching.

Technorati Tags: chembank, chemical structures

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Google Trends is an interesting tools to see trends in what people are searching for on Google. I decided to do a little investigation on some items of interest to the drug industry.

1. Vioxx: I looked at the trends for “Vioxx”and the results spike at the end of Sept 2004 when Merck announced they were withdrawing the drug from the market. It’s been relatively flat since.

2. If you limit the results to just the US, it is interesting that the number one city searching for Vioxx was Barnwell, SC (population 24,000), So I was curious as to why such a small town in SC would be by far and away the largest searcher for the term Vioxx. A quick search for “vioxx” and Barnwell yields the answer; one of the law firms involved in the Vioxx case in NJ was Weitz & Luxenberg and they have offices in Barnwell, SC. They also have offices in Mannford, OH.

3. Search for “Plan B” has also seen a trend up. Unfortunately, Google trends doesn’t list any news items for this term.

4. A Search for “FDA” shows that there are more than twice as many searches for this term in India than in the US. This isn’t surprising since India is a growing market for pharmaceutical products, active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) and other related services.

If we limit it to the US, then Rockville, MD is the number one city, not surprising since that’s where the FDA headquarters are located.

I’m sure there may be even more interesting results after I’ve had time to play with it more. Also, keep in mind that uncommon search terms don’t give good results.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Trends

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I just wanted to let folks know that a few days ago, I posted episode 2 of “Searching the Internet” podcast. This episode covers how to use some of the advanced search features on Google and Yahoo. You can read the show notes on the site or subscribe via iTunes by clicking here (mp3 version).

If you want to subscribe to the enhanced version in iTunes or to listen to on your iPod the link is below:

http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/?feed=rss2&category_name=enhanced-podcast-aac

Copy the above link and go to iTunes. Under the menu item “Advanced” select “Subscribe to Podcast” and in the resulting dialog box, paste in the above URL. This will subscribe you to the enhanced version of “Searching the Internet” and allows you to automatically get all future episodes when they are posted. The enhanced version offers the advantage of placing a picture in the lower left corner of itunes to let you know what that section of the podcast is all about as well as a URL link to the page I’m talking about. You can also skip to certain parts within the podcast by clicking on the icon just to the left of the the search bar. It looks like this:

If you use iTunes and an iPod, I highly recommend the enhanced version. Episode 3 should be out later this week and will cover some non-search engine sites to find addresses, phone numbers, and more.

Technorati Tags: podcast

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