Effective Google Search Guidelines For Medical Transcriptionists

By Raj | Mar 30, 2009

Google is the virtual God for anyone online or at least for us, medical transcriptionists! You ask anything to God Google, he gets you the answer in a matter of a fraction of a second! However, I find that a lot of my medical transcriptionist friends are still not up to the mark while performing searches on Google (or rather while requesting boons from Google God), and I don’t know how effectively are your searches too in squeezing the maximum out of Google while searching for the words that the doctor speeds through or mumbles. This post is aimed to reveal all the ins and outs, tips, tricks and techniques, everything that can be done with Google to get the maximum out of your search.

I think by this time most of you might be having an account with Google, at least a Gmail account. If not yet, open a new Google account, which is absolutely free. Apart from those softwares provided for safeguarding yourself while browsing, Google offers a host of free services which will be helpful to you while being online, out of which ‘web history’ is the most important one for us as it keeps the track record of what we have searched earlier on Google and the pages that we visited after a search etc. A search within your search history is possible with a Google account, a reason good enough for you to sign up for a Google account. Once you have a Google account, do remember to always sign in before you conduct searches on Google. You may find it more helpful installing a Google Toolbar on your browser instead of reaching the Google main page each time to conduct your query.

If you are a master of Google searches by this time, you might be thorough with the features like using Google as a calculator or to use Google as a unit conversion tool. Now these tips, tricks and techniques, almost all of which are already listed in Google search features other than the basic Google search tips, are aimed at improvising Google search “the best” for you.

Always Use Google Suggest

Use Google suggest to perform effective searches

If you’re not sure of the spelling of a search term you’re looking for, take advantage of the query suggestion feature. Just start typing in the search box and suggestions of relevant search terms will automatically display. For eg., the doctor was dictating something similar to “splenule of the corpus callosum” but a splenule can never occur in brain. Google suggest came to my rescue then, it was actually “splenium of the corpus callosum.” The term splenium was new to me then. Similarly, the other time the doctor was dictating something like “Osseola Medical Center” whereas the actual spelling was Osceola Medical Center. So before hitting the search button, I just got the answer what I was about to search for. This excellent feature was made available to the public as a standard feature only a few months back and searching on Google has become more easy from then, hence don’t disable ‘Google Auto Suggest’ if at all you are about to turn it off on the Google preferences page. (Many transcriptionists have already turned this feature off.)

Use Operator Signs To Refine Your Query

Google ignores common words and characters such as where, the, how, and other digits and letters that slow down your search without improving the results. If you think that a common word is essential to get the results you want, you can make it by putting a “+” sign in front of it. The plus sign just before a search term means “This MUST be found in the search.” On the other hand, if you find a lot of search results that include a specific product, word, phrase, or item that you do not want to see, you can put a minus sign before that word or phrase, and those results will be excluded from your search. Let me hope by this time you are familiar with the usage of the operators AND OR (All caps). A pipe sign (|) can be used in place of OR in your query. This means you can search for a hospital in Miami | Long Beach for example instead of Miami OR Long Beach.

Google Site Search

You remember finding a term on a particular site but now you don’t know the URL where you found that term on that site. ‘Site search’ feature of Google comes to your help in such situations. Supposedly you found the term “safinamide” on mtherald.com and want to land on that again, you go for a site search on Google with site:mtherald.com safinamide

Precise Search With Double Quotes

Surround the phrase that you are searching within quotes would fetch you the results that match exactly the same phrase, a powerful technique mostly ignored by medical transcriptionists. Suppose you want to find the terms ‘orthopedic support footwear’ in the same order, a search with these terms in double quotes, “orthopedic support footwear” will get you precise results than a search without quotes.

Wild-Card Search With Asterisk

Insert an asterisk if you are interested in getting an unknown term before your search phrases or multiple asterisks (up to ten) for getting multiple words before your search phrase. Eg. **intravitreal insert for diabetic macular edema or for a more precise result within double quotes “**intravitreal insert for diabetic macular edema”

Definition Search

If you couldn’t find a definition for the word that you’re looking for in your dictionary, this operator can be helpful in finding the definition. Eg., define:osteoporosis

Synonym Search

Placing a tilde sign (~) immediately in front of your search term will bring you synonyms of the search term.

Advanced Search

Without the need of memorizing all the above said tips and tricks, you can do these searches in different permutation and combination with Google advanced search accessible from Google’s main page itself.

I’m Feeling Lucky

Well, I must put you across this question. How many of you have hit the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button instead of the ‘Google Search’ button while performing searches? Only a handful of you would have! Hitting the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button instead of ‘Google Search’ button will bypass Google’s results page and will take you to the first web page returned for your query.

Topic Specific Vertical Search

Instead of searching for a term across all the web pages, searching within a specialized area will bring you more refined results. Google has a number of specific searches, allowing you to search within blogs, news, books, and an umpteen other, a few of which are:

Miscellaneous Other Tips

You need not have to use plural forms of a search term.
Forget about capitalization at least while searching on Google. Search results provided by Google are case insensitive, all the letters that you type in are considered to be in the lower case except for some operators that I mentioned above.
Except for some exceptions, punctuations are ignored.
If you want to have a snapshot of a web page on a domain that is down or inaccessible for some unknown reason, click on the ‘cached’ link in the search results.

All these tips should make Google better for you, a well preparedness for facing the challenges of medical transcription. Do you have any other tips that I missed here?

Reference: How to Google? (For medical transcriptionists.)

5 Responses to “Effective Google Search Guidelines For Medical Transcriptionists”

Mark on April 3rd, 2009, at 8:42 pm said:

Google is like gift from haven. I started to realize that before 2 years. I don’t know how much knowledge I got just from magic google. I always recommend it to any one who ask me something. “Do you know how much Sweden have citizen” and my answer is “Google it”.
Mark

Abishai on May 9th, 2009, at 3:06 pm said:

Life would be crude without Google. At least people would’nt want to go back in time for once. Life was not so much easier 20 years ago after all ! Thank God For Google.

Serena on May 18th, 2009, at 11:49 am said:

Research skills are absolutely essential to a medical transcriptionist, and Google should indeed play a large part in those skills. Very informative.

Susan on January 14th, 2011, at 11:14 pm said:

For those of you who have to type in addresses for carbon copies, and the dictator slurs the name of the town at best, but the zip code is loud and clear, add this Google feature to your home page or Igoogle Area/Zip Code Lookup.

Works for me!

Raj on January 15th, 2011, at 1:59 am said:

Thanks Susan. That’s a very good information. Added the link to that gadget’s page in your comment.