Over the last year, we have seen a lot of activity in the area of "portals", or starting places for searching the internet (assuming its worth doing this!). One approach has been the development of "channels", or collections of grouped search sites which provide "one stop" searches. One particular implementation on the platform I do a lot of work on is called Sherlock. This is a system level "find" interface which can be easily configured using little files called Sherlock Plug-ins. Our site for example is via http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/chemime/chemdig/chemdig.src.hqx By dropping this onto one's system, one can then go to the "chemistry channel" (actually, only with MacOS 9) and when a search term is specified, all sites in this channel can be searched simultaneously if desired, or groups of sites can be selected. The search results are all returned to your computer. It struck me therefore that it might be worthwhile to persuade all the major sites which support search facilities and have significant chemical content, to group together to form such a "chemistry" search channel. Perhaps there are others out there already? If not, I donate the one above to this inaugural collection! The above is a MacOS solution only. In fact, there are many other such aggregators, ie http://winfiles.cnet.com/apps/nt/webtools-search.html One we use (Copernic) is supported on both MacOS and Windows. Clearly, the field is developing rapidly, although presumably to promote e-commerce. In this mad rush to make money on the Internet, specialised fields such as Chemistry might get bypassed! To succeed, I suspect we all have to cooperate with eachother! If anyone out there has or wishes to develop a Sherlock plug to get the ball rolling, do let this list (or me) know. If there is demand, we could set up a site to collect all the plugins and then create our own chemistry channel! If anyone knows that this has already been done then again do let us See http://developer.apple.com/macos/sherlock.html for more details. Henry Rzepa. +44 171 594 5774 (Office) +44 171 594 5804 (Fax) Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7 2AY, UK. http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)