Everyone is on it, or talking about it, or trying to figure out how to get on it. Commercials plug it, stockholders love it, and Vice President Al Gore even thinks he's the father of it.

What is it? The answer, of course, is the Internet, and, in particular, the World Wide Web (the most popular way of accessing the Internet). The Web is an easily accessed graphic portal to the vast network of interconnected computers that make up the Internet and that, collectively, store trillions of pieces of information on every topic imaginable. The information on the Web is organized into individual "pages" or "sites" that are linked to one another in sprawling patterns so complex that researchers are still trying to understand them.

But while the hidden structure may be complex, actually using the Web can be as easy as "One, two, click..." Most people find that it takes only a day or two to learn how to move from one page to the next (moving around on the Web is far easier than programming a VCR, for instance), and this ease of use is contributing to the growing number of Americans who are turning to the Internet to find information.

One traditional "members only" fortress of knowledge that's been widely penetrated by the Web is that of health and medical information. According to a recent Harris Poll, 70 million Americans used the Internet between June 1998 and June 1999 to find health-related information.

Two of the major advantages of finding health information on the Web for those with rare disorders and/or limited mobility are the huge amounts of information available and the instant access, 24 hours a day, from the comfort and privacy of home. The Web can be such a lifeline of information that many people with neuromuscular disorders and other chronic health problems are wondering how they ever did without it.

Tina Welsh of Lawrenceville, Ga., who considers herself "Internet-educated," uses the Web frequently to find general health information and information on her children's myotonic muscular dystrophy (MMD).

"It's unbelievable!" Welsh says. "You can find anything on the Internet. A lot of times when you're in the doctor's office and they tell you something, you're not thinking what to ask them next. So you go home and think of all these questions that you could have asked them, but now you really don't have access to them. So you get on the Internet and you look it up. Everything is right at your fingertips."

And the Internet isn't just used by health care consumers, it's also increasingly used by professionals. Jennifer Enright-Ford, a nurse consultant to the Wisconsin Department of Transpor-tation in Madison, recently visited the MDA Web site to look up information on myotonic dystrophy. Enright-Ford uses the Internet at work to find current medical information and to educate the Transportation staff on health issues.

"With 3.8 million drivers in Wisconsin," she says, "the health conditions which arise as concerns run from very common to very obscure. It was obvious to me from my first day that I would be doing a lot of online searching for medical information.

"I think one of the best things about the Internet is the reduction of the barriers between the information and the individual."

Do you have a burning question? If so, you can probably find the answer online, whether you're looking for clinical trials, the side effects of a new prescription, a good orthopedist for heel cord release surgery, a primer on health insurance, details on a newly diagnosed medical problem, archives of answered medical questions or the latest research.

Even for those who always have to know more (you know who you are), there's always more information available. If you dig a bit deeper, you can find out an impressive amount of scientific detail about different gene mutations, ongoing research and treatment strategies.

But, as many Internet users have discovered, even with information, you can have too much of a good thing. Knowing the facts are out there is one thing, but actually finding the particular bit you want is a whole different ball game. Because the connections, or links, between pages of information on the Web aren't uniformly organized according to some master plan, programs that search for keywords among millions of Web pages are critical to the information retrieval process. And not all of these programs, known as search engines, are equal when it comes to finding medical information.

Most search engines work by looking for specific keywords in the text on a page and some look at portions of the computer code for that page that aren't visible to the viewer, so-called "hidden keywords." These search engines look for keywords in pages that have been recognized by the program and cataloged, either automatically or by people who evaluate pages and place them in categories.

Although thorough (a typical search for "Duchenne muscular dystrophy" on About.com found 740 documents), these traditional search engines can be frustrating because they don't always turn up the biggest or the most important site first.

This problem has been somewhat overcome by search engines such as Google (www.google.com), which look for keywords, but also evaluate the number of links going to and from a certain site. The result is that the largest and most popular sites more often appear first in the rankings.

Many people just starting out, however, may not want to search the entire Web for information. Sometimes it's easier to start on a trusted health-related Web site and just search the pages on that particular site through an "internal search engine." The list of "hits" is likely to be shorter and more relevant to your search.

For instance, if you searched the whole Web for "Lou Gehrig," you'd find as much information on baseball as you would on Lou Gehrig's disease. But if you made the same search on a health-related Web site, you'd likely find only information pertinent to the disease.

Story continues on next screen > >