I've Been A-Searchin'

Looking something up on the Internet is something of a crapshoot.

Search The Blue Nowhere and you'll find all sorts of things, from medical journals to crackpots in caves posting the ephemera of their dreams as fact.  The unwary seeker could find themselves mired in a morass of misinformation at the click of a mouse.

Researching a medical condition ups the ante considerably.

If the denizens of Blogopolis, Wikiworld, and all points between are to be believed, everything leads to cancer, death, and unsightly body hair growth.

One almost needs to know about what one is researching before beginning, which somewhat defeats the purpose.

I have found plenty of wonderful resources regarding fish tanks, snakes, recipes using water chestnuts, and a host of other trifles.  I have found plenty of dubious results when mining for informative nuggets.  Sometimes it is not easy to discern fact from fantasy.  I like to think I have a good filter, a keen sense of (although I'm not terribly attached to) reality, and my wits about me, and I find it easy to get lost on the information highway, make a wrong turn, and wind up in some backwater burg where eye of newt is still the most popular panacea for what ails ya.

Again, I feel as though I am well equipped to research - I have a nominally good head on my shoulders, a small but sturdy foundation in medical fooferaw (that is TOO a word, spell check!), and a steady disposition when it comes to things that ook normal folks out.  Ask anyone who knows me and they'll likely say "Who are you and why are you talking to me?", but then they'll tell you I am not prone to panic or faint when there's blood or weirdness happening.  I don't weep and wail when told that I or someone I love has something unpronounceable and entirely new to my medical lexicon.  I buckle down and look it up, learn the ropes, arm myself with knowledge, and face the enemy with fair confidence that I know how to vanquish it, or at least say its name without sounding like I have an affliction of an entirely different sort.

Something unremarkable, like, say, finding a cold remedy, can be amusing, occasionally enlightening, and not terribly unpleasant.  Looking up something less common, though...perhaps a condition your child had been diagnosed with...that's a whole other story.  Posts passing themselves off as expertise are written by the cousin of a friend who heard about the condition from their hair dresser's grandmother's veterinarian while stomping grapes ten years ago.  Posts that could be truly informative are two-hundred pages along on the list because hey!  Who needs real information, anyway, when we have The Internets to entertain and distract  us?

Search results should come with a warning, something along the lines of "Caution:  results contain 80% doom and gloom, 15% BS, and 5% grammatical errors and may cause cranial swelling, lacrimal eruptions, and spontaneous combustion."

Traveler beware, here there be dragons.  No, really, there are whole pages dedicated to proving the existence of dragons - I saw it on the Internet, so it must be true!