About the Patient Education Online Search Engine

The search engine is a state-of-the-art tool designed for sophisticated collections of site-specific information. It runs in conjunction with a layer of semantic metadata that has been applied to all of the information in the website so that the content, though written by multiple authors and derived from many resources, is completely integrated and connected by these topic-based tags.

When a user searches for information on Patient Education Online, the search engine looks for matches with the metadata so that it is not relying on matching exact words when they appear in the content but, rather, on the true meaning of the concepts detailed in the content. Therefore, users can find all the relevant discussions of the topic they are looking for, even if named differently in different resources.

If a user cannot find the results he or she is looking for using the semantic search engine, he or she can perform a full-text search that allows the Boolean connectors "and" and "or" and that searches through each word in the data set. A full-text search is automatically run if there are no matches with semantic metadata.