People today in pursuit of the best of the best - be it the highest rated car, appliance or even nearby restaurant - have all turned to the utility of the World Wide Web to find it.

Now, with sites like RateMDs.com, vitals.com and DrScore.com, people are bringing the demand for quality to a new level - using the Web to rate doctors.

These living, breathing, hard-working professionals are now being scored on the same ranking systems you may find online rating kitchen appliances, leaving many doctors up in arms.

"I'd say we get legal threats from doctors on a weekly basis," said John Swapceinski, co-founder of RateMDs.com, who estimated about two-thirds of the doctors he has come into contact with since launching the site in 2004 have reacted negatively to it.

The site allows patients to sign on, search for a doctor they're interested in, and read other patients opinions, as well as their ratings of the doctor - on a scale from 1 to 5 - regarding the quality of their staff, punctuality, helpfulness and knowledge. Searches for doctors in this area can also be made. The site has ratings for 20 doctors in Attleboro, alone, for example, with over 30 other Attleboro area doctor profiles waiting to be rated by anonymous posters world-wide.

While the tool can be useful, it is the personal comments section that has been getting the RateMDs site in trouble.

"I think physicians may worry about their reputation and how it's viewed online. There's a little bit of danger, especially in terms of the qualitative data," said Karen Reed, director of patient quality and safety at Caritas Hospital in Norwood.

The other leading online sites for rating doctors, DrScore.com and Vitals.com, do not have personal comment pages on their site. They restrict reviewers to the same survey questions when rating a doctor.

Swapceinski, however, said he wants to give his site-users the chance to speak their own mind.

"We're giving freedom of speech to both parties," Swapceinski said, "And there's obviously a downside to all ratings: Some are motivated to rate products up, some are motivated to rate products down, but we try to identify all spamming of doctor's ratings with our software, and we've been pretty successful."

The potential spam, Swapceinski said, arises when the site notices too many posts from the same computer trying to boost or destroy a doctor's online image.

Swapceinski and other Web hosting services, thanks to today's Internet laws, are off-the-hook in regards to keeping potentially libelous posts up on their Web sites.

According to the law, the Internet sites, unlike publishers of libelous statements, are not responsible for what is said because they are merely "distributors" of anonymous comments.

"Yes, people post comments without revealing their identity and they cannot be tracked - nor will the ISP (Internet Service Provider) give out any information about the poster. Congress had good intentions, but the unintended consequences of the legislation have been harmful," said Donald Fishman, a professor at Boston College who teaches classes in intellectual property law.

Swapceinski himself admitted there is a large potential for bias on his site because it rates a human-to-human connection rather than a product.

"I guess personalities come into play. There could be some bias, either pro or against. I never really thought of it that way before," Swapceinski said.

Nonetheless, Swapceinski supports his site and its intentions for consumers.

"There's sort of been a lack of rating for all professional services, but medical is the most important one because it really is a matter of life and death," Swapceinski said.

Dr. Sujana Chaparala of Caritas Hospital agrees, saying the site has the potential to inform patients better than ever before.

"It's a great idea for people who don't know where to find a good doctor," Chaparala said. "Giving patients good information makes it easy for people to choose - as long as its done in a fair way."

Reed agreed.

"Ratings agencies are looking at the quality of the data from these Web sites online," she said. "You still have to be careful on the Internet because it's not a monitored place for quality."

The sites are such a new phenomenon in the medical world, few doctors and health professionals know what to think of it at this point.

Joan Flynn, director of risk management at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, for example, chose not to comment for this story, saying it is too early to know for certain the effects of such sites.

Though Reed cautions patients from relying solely on such sites and trusting the information they provide, she has confidence down the road they will be able to improve patient care.

"The good thing about transparency like this is that it does drive improvement and makes the medical field better as a whole," Reed said. "I just think it's an emerging area of work, so it's not where you'd really like it to be yet."