This could almost be boiled down to five websites: NHS Direct; Patient UK, a site run by two Newcastle family doctors; Healthfinder, which is a site sponsored by the US government; MEDLINEplus, which includes the site of the US National Library of Medicine; and, for keeping up to date on what's available and for issues surrounding health on the net, He@lth Information on the Internet, a site run by Robert Kiley, information service manager at the Wellcome Trust. Kiley is also the author of Medical Information on the Internet: A Guide for Health Professionals which is a perfect starter guide for more serious health consumers who want not only a good grounding in how to look up the odd piece of health or medical information but also to become relatively, or very expert. It's available from www.amazon.co.uk for £19.95 and is kept up to date at www.hbuk.co.uk/kiley.

You can of course just set off to look for what you want using a standard search engine or, in the portal-type sites, their health categories. The former will provide a huge number of results that you will have to trawl through, unless you can define your search with some precision. The latter will give you the search engine's selection, including lots of commercial sources for information. A more focused approach can be tried through the following.

NHS Direct Online (www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk)

This is the official NHS website, and at the moment is listed as much for its potential as for what it can already do. After a somewhat clunky start, this looks like being one of the things the NHS has got right, and there are big plans for it. It provides the phone number for the nurse-led helpline of NHS Direct itself: 0845 4647 - a service that will cover the whole of England by the end of 2000. But it provides much more than that.

There is an online healthcare guide with simple advice about a range of conditions, and which can tell you within half-a-dozen clicks to ring 999 if that band of pain around your chest looks like being a heart attack. At the moment the clinical section is limited. But there are plans to link it into the computer-led protocols that the nurses in NHS Direct call-centres use, across the whole range of conditions, to advise people whether to self-treat, visit a pharmacist, see a doctor, go to an accident and emergency department or ring 999.

It contains a monthly health feature, which is archived - a recent one was on travelling abroad - and contains lots of useful links. And its Conditions and Treatment section has links to many hundreds of patient organisations and self-help groups - the links take you to their websites where they have them, and to an online version of patient information leaflets where they exist. If an organisation is not yet on the web, it provides phone numbers and contact addresses, plus the price of hard copy leaflets and books.

The websites to which NHS Direct Online links have been quality checked by Omni, an organisation that seeks to provide a UK gateway to quality information on the net but which is aimed more at professionals than consumers. The leaflets to which the site points have been given a star rating for quality by the Centre for Health Information Quality (www.hfht.org/chiq). There is also a Hot Issues button, which changes every day and is a good way of checking out the latest health stories or health scares - the decision to advise the removal of soya oil breast implants, for example, or the latest pill or vaccine issue. It lets you see what the health department actually said, not just what the media reported.

This is an official NHS site. But its policy to date has been to be open about disagreements over what t