There's a wealth of trauma related information on the internet, and not all conveniently presented at the 'liver trauma web site' or 'spinal immobilisation home pages'. To track down this sort of information, you can browse through web sites yourself, or you can use a search engine, which has already catalogued the whole internet, to do the search for you

There are various types of search facility, which you will find useful at different times for different means. The web catalogues, such as Yahoo, are run by carbon based life forms (humans usually) who manually look at selected web sites, rate it for its content, and catalogue it. These catalogues do well for finding sites whose main topic is what you're interested in, but won't take you to the Dr. A. Anaesthetist's home page with an article on intubating patients with cervical spine injuries.

Then there are search engines maintained by silicon based life forms (computers) whose software 'bots (robots) regularly trawl the web looking at all pages and index the words in those pages. When you perform a search on, for example, 'liver trauma' it extracts from its database all pages with the words 'liver' and 'trauma' from them, and ranks them according to how many times those words appear in the pages. However you may find yourself reading pages on alcoholic liver damage or completely unrelated pages containing both words but not related to each other.

The third method (interestingly enough here at TRAUMA.ORG) allows you to search through all the pages in the main trauma and injury prevention web sites, so you have a similar depth of search, while the breadth remains controllable and the subject matter within focus.

Trauma Search	The Trauma Search engine at TRAUMA.ORG allows you to search all the pages in the top 10 or so internet trauma and injury prevention web sites.
Internet Search	There are numerous internet search engines, of which the most current and complete is HotBot. You will find different search engines give you different results depending on their breadth of coverage and method of deciding which pages are the most relevant. Note that with the 4.0 series browsers (Netscape Communicator, Internet Explorer 4.0) you can type your search query into the 'Location' window and the browser will automatically pick a search engine for you. HotBot AltaVista InfoSeek Excite
Internet Catalogues	Yahoo is probably the best known and most often access internet catalogue. Medical Matrix provides more a focused medical catalogue. Yahoo Medical Matrix
Mailing Lists	Medline