Developing a Search Engine for Pharmacotherapeutic Information that is Not Published in Biomedical Journals

Objective: To identify publishers of pharmacotherapeutic information not found in biomedical journals that focuses on evaluating and providing advice on medicines and to develop a search engine to access this information. Methods: Compiling web sites that publish information on the rational use of medicines and have no commercial interests. Free-access web sites in Spanish, Galician, Catalan or English. Designing a search engine using the Google ‘‘custom search’’ application. Results: Overall 159 Internet addresses were compiled and were classified into 9 labels. We were able to recover the information from the selected sources using a search engine, which is called ‘‘AlquimiA’’ and available from http://www.elcomprimido.com/FARHSD/AlquimiA.htm Conclusions: The main sources of pharmacotherapeutic information not published in biomedical journals were identified. The search engine is a useful tool for searching and accessing ‘‘grey literature’’ on the Internet.