HON Projects and Initiatives: the Hunts Projects

MARVIN uses a purpose-built medical dictionary of 20,000 words plus the 33,000 Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) from the National Library of Medicine, U.S.A. to retrieve automatically the unreviewed sites. Each word has been given a weight describing its relevance and specificity in documents for health and medicine. The weightings have been obtained by performing a statistical evaluation of all words contained in a preselected set of 1,000 medical documents.

MARVIN searches the Web and selects only documents that are relevant to the health and medical fields. Document relevance is computed according to a formula that takes into consideration the number of words from the medical dictionary that are found in the document, as well as their associated weights.

Selected documents are stored in MedHunt's global database which is organized in four categories; a general one including all the health/medical web sites and the three others dedicated respectively to the hospitals, support groups and conferences. MedHunt also proposes a simultaneous translation of the queries in eight languages (English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish) with a pre-formatted search associated with the translations.