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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technorati Tags: chemical structures, eMolecules

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

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

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

science inurl:(rss OR rdf OR atom OR xml OR feed)

You need to make sure and include the colon and that there is no space between the colon and the left parenthesis.

While this is not a perfect solution, it does go a long way towards allowing you to use Google to find only web (rss) feeds. If you enjoyed this tip, then be sure to listen to the soon to be posted Searching the Internet podcast episode 2 where I’ll discuss the various advanced commands in Google and Yahoo as well as other search engine related topics.

Technorati Tags: Google, inurl, search engine, web feed

One of the things about them that I like is the ability to limit your search results to RSS feeds. After a search, in the bar below the text search box, you have three buttons; audio, video, and RSS. If you click on RSS, it limits your results to those containing feeds. Unfortunately, you can’t get the results of the search by RSS.

Another thing I like is they have made sure the search engine works under Safari on the Mac platform. The fact that the results include a thumbnail preview of the website is great too. This is definitely a search engine to keep an eye on.

Being interested in chemistry here’s the feed for chemistry related questions. Looking over the open questions, it seems some may be homework questions. I’ve always wondered how much the Internet has changed homework and the whole educational situation, but that’s another topic for another day.

You can easily form your own query without even visiting Yahoo answers just by changing the url. Here’s one I did for Hawaii

feed://answers.yahoo.com/rss/searchq?p=hawaii

You can form your own feed by changing “hawaii” to whatever terms you want.

Another feature is you can track questions by users. You can track and see what questions individuals are asking. I find this interesting and it reminds me that you need to be careful what you post on the Internet.

While I’ve not personally found this to be all that worthwhile it could is another interesting use of RSS.