The Galaxy
Search Engine
This week I did a search on Lycos and Galaxy on "mental health". Lycos was very simple and easy to use. There was one area where you could type in the word that you want to search for, but for those who aren't sure what word to use, there's also another section under that where the search areas are already divided into categories so you can merely browse through the links provided here if you'd rather have a freer approach to searching. Lycos reminded me of Yahoo except that the Yahoo logo is a little jazzier. It returned 320 links to me, and as far as I can tell, while they weren't all what I was looking for, they were relevant to the topic at hand. I liked the format of how the hits were returned to me. There was an outline of the page as well as an abstract describing what was on the page. Anytime my search word arose in the outline or the abstract, the word was bold-faced; this is common for most of the search engines.
The Galaxy
Search EngineGalaxy had a similar search format in that there was one area where the search topics are organized for you by category so you don't have to worry about search words. If the category is listed, you can just click on that and see what's available. I liked Galaxy's category list better than Lycos's because it was much more extensive and you were more likely to find your search topic. Like Lycos, Galaxy also had a search option where you can type in your search word. This one was a little more complicated than Lycos, firstly because they give you the option to search for either or both search words. They also give you the option to search the entire text, the title only, or links only. I think this is great for those who want this option, but personally, I preferred Lycos's simpler approach. I don't like to deal with options. Galaxy returned 1500 hits to me, many, many more than Lycos. I liked Lycos better because I felt that they delivered the most relevant hits first, whereas with Galaxy, I didn't feel like there was any particular order to the hits. I did, though, like the way that the hits were returned in that there was an excerpt from the page, a list of frequently used words, and an outline of the page. In this respect, Galaxy was superior.
All in all, I'd have to choose Lycos to do a search typing in search words, but I'd use Galaxy if I wanted to browse through the ready-made category lists.
The best link I found was from Lycos to a page called Cyber-Psych. Cyber-Psych is committed to bringing high quality, professional psychological care and information to the on-line community. They believe that the internet provides a non-threatening, interactive medium through which mental health care can be provided to the rapidly increasing population of people on-line. This page is meant to be an on-line "switchboard" to psychology-related areas, and let me tell you this page has tons of links to fun as well as informational links in psychology.
The first area I visited was Psychology Journals. I never realized that there were so many psychological journals on-line. The breadth of the internet never ceases to amaze me! But anyway, there were links to many different psych. journals such as The American Journal of Psychology. I didn't particularly care for this link because it was a link to gopherŒs abstract about the American Journal of Psychology rather than the home page of the journal itself and while there was a table of contents for the current issue as well as indications of future articles that will appear in the journal, there were no actual journal articles so this link was not all that helpful. The International Journal of Psychiatry was much better in that they had links to each different section from their current issue as well as an archive of old issues and also links to other related sites. This is what I liked about the link to another journal, Noetica: A Cognitive Science Forum which is a journal having to do with cognitive psychology. Aside from a table of contents, there were links to other relevant areas of psychology. My favorite link was Dr. Grohol's Mental Health Page because it was well-organized and easy to use with lots of relevant mental health links.
Another very interesting journal that I found was Psycoloquy, a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary electronic journal. What's interesting about this is that it's entirely on the internet, and so, revolutionary in a sense. Researchers send in their articles and they can receive instant feedback from their peers about the research that they're conducting. What a great way to utilize the internet in fostering communication between individuals that would not otherwise occur. This journal is a good example of some of the social psychological principles discussed in class. For example, it allows people to put themselves out there to be criticized or praised. It allows the social interaction between individuals in a helping manner. I think one of the main functions of the internet is to help others, whether it be by attaining valuable information, or through social interactions. This kind of forum not only allows the publisher to gain information, it also allows the readers to gain information on what kind of research is being done. Thus, the internet provides a new avenue for social interaction in a helpful manner.
The most helpful resource of all that I found on this page of journals is the WWW Virtual Library Electronic Journals Catalog. If you're looking for any journal on the web this is the place to go. You can either click on to various categories of journals to see what's available, or, if you have a particular journal in mind, you can type in the journal name and do a search on it. This is yet another example of the way in which the internet serves a social psychological function of helping others. Whereas with Psycoloquy, the help was through direct interaction and for both the reader and the publisher, this type of help is to navigate through the complexities of the internet itself. While the publisher of the page is also helped in his/her own efforts to navigate the internet, a page such as this is more altruistic in intention, mainly helping the netsurfer who lands on the page.
The
Internet Mental Health Home Page
Aside from the many journals Cyber-Psych was linked to, another very informative mental health link led me to the Internet Mental Health Home Page. If you're looking for information on mental health you've come to the right place! This page gives you a description of various disorders as well as their treatment and the kinds of research being done on them. Some disorders also have links to magazine articles or booklets about the disorder. In addition, there are descriptions of the various psychiatric medications available, a link to Mental Health Magazine, free software, and most importantly, other related internet links. From this "internet links" page, you can find even more links to mental health resources. It is absolutely amazing how many mental health resources there are on the net. Searching through these lists of resources, I noticed that Yahoo, Gopher, and Galaxy also have their own listing of resources so if you haven't already found what you were looking for, you can search another engine and are sure to find more hits.
The Keirsey Temperament Sorter
Because I don't have time to go throught all of Cyber-Psych's many important links to the mental health internet resources, you'll have to browse throught them yourself, but one last one that I thought was fun is one to the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, which is a personality test which scores results according to the Meyers-Briggs system (the actual Meyers-Briggs test is a professional instrument and may only be administered by a licensed practitioner). The test is scored on four different scales:
That's all for this week! Till, next week, surf on, dudes! (. . . DUDES?!?! Where did that word come from?)
