Quertle is not your average search engine; it’s a powerhouse semantic search engine. It trolls the internet in search of facts within documents and creates its own database of relationships. So, when you search with Quertle, you receive results that are closely associated to your desired research query. Quertle also supplies relevant results because it covers only the medical field and a select few databases such as Medline’s collection in PubMed, BioMed Central, PubMed Central, and various news sources.

It is better to think of Quertle as a concept engine as opposed to a simple search engine. The best way to search with Quertle is to enter a query using the “subject-verb-object” model. The example Quertle provides to their users in the FAQ/About Us section is as follows: “aspirin treats headache.” Another trick is to replace either the subject or object with the word “what.” This is how the system’s algorithm understands and interprets search queries– in a relational sense. Because of this, no Boolean operators are needed to perform a search with Quertle.

Along with the author- and journal-specific search functions on the main page, Quertle also offers the use of Power Terms. These are a set of terms assigned by Quertle that represent already existing relationships. For example, instead of entering “positive negative actions ethanol”–following the “subject-verb-object” search model–you can simply use the Power Term $Actions to stand for “all actions, both positive and negative.” Your search query would then look as follows: “ethanol $Actions.

You can access Quertle through the MSK library web site by searching in the E-Resources Title Search box at the top of the page. Also, after you perform a Quertle search, you can click on either the PDF icon under the title of one of the results to view the full-text, or if there is no icon, simply click on the “My Library” link under the title to be directed to the MSK Document Delivery ILLiad page where you can log in and request the full-text of an article not in our holdings.