My search service assignment was for http://www.nih.gov/ .

The National Institutes of Health, a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is focused on medical and behavioral research. Their website is has a simple layout which is easy to navigate and read, and it is in all blue and white which makes it look professional. The main purpose of the site is to give information to the public about new medical/behavioral advances, conditions, and research. The “About NIH” tab at the top of the page allowed me to find out all kinds of facts about the agency, including how to search for accurate medical information on the web, the purpose of the website, information about diseases and conditions, etc. It was full of useful information which helped me to better understand the purpose of the site and its search services. I found out that the website is actually a large collection of sites, which are updated at different times so some of the information on the NIH website is brand new, and some is older. The search service that they provide can be used to look up a variety of health topics from broad to specific, and there is an option for an advanced search to narrow down results as well.

I chose to look up information on asthma by using the Google search and NIH search, which was at the top of the main page, and compare the results. What I found was that since Google is such a broad search engine there were far more results than on the NIH website, with Google producing 32,300,00 results compared to NIH at 26,300. The results of the NIH search actually used Google but filtered the results, so they both wound up bringing me to many of the same websites. Ironically, the first website listed on the results page of the Google search was the NIH website. Using Google turned out to be an accurate way to find websites with medical information but the downside is that it doesn’t filter out unuseful websites like the NIH search does.