http://www.scirus.com/ as a Scientific search engine
Elsevier have recently announced http://www.scirus.com/, "a powerful new search engine developed for locating scientific information only" Of course, that is a bold claim, and can only be tested by conducting some searches. No doubt, the nature of the search will strongly influence the result. I decided to search for the term mobius and aromaticity largely because there is not a great deal known, and I am reasonably familiar with what is (in a narrow area, but not so much in a wider context) Unsurprisingly, http://www.scirus.com/ gave 6 Science direct articles our of the first 7 hits, and again unsurprisingly, gave no hits on articles published by other publishers! None of our own work was found, and the top hit looked distinctly out of the mainstream of the query. http://www..google.com/ on the other hand found an equally scientifically interesting selection, which of course excluded journal articles, and was indeed 100% orthogonal to scirus. I was flattered by having two of our articles in the top 8 here, including a talk I give on the subject. For comparison, SciFinder probably gives the "best" scientific selection, but this of course does not include Web pages, and WOS is only slightly inferior. Both COST money! Based on this single search, I would be reluctant to suggest that http://www.scirus.com/, was significantly better than Google, and in particular its inevitable focus on Elsevier journals to the apparent exclusion of others must be taken into consideration. Comments on what the "best" Scientific search engine is are welcome! -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (0)20 7594 5774 (Office) +44 (0870) 132-3747 (eFax) 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)
Henry, Scirus uses robots and, like all automatic engines, cannot be expected to use any judgement about what is genuinely science. If you are going to handle vast quantities of information, you cannot do it manually. A literature review has appeared and I imagine that Elsevier will be learning from it, to the benefit of later releases. As regards the "Rzepa" searches, I gather that Steve Bachrach also had some trouble finding some of his own articles. ChemIndustry is becoming very popular (probably as a result of referrals from CAS, amongst other things) and is less likely to index something that is not chemistry, since human intervention is involved. However, the human can intervene in all sorts of ways, and, as you yourself pointed out some time ago, a high ranking in the hit list is not necessarily allocated for altruistic reasons. ChemGuide.de is much less used (according to Netscape and Steve Heller). It too uses experts to sift out the dross. As far as I know, you can't buy a place in its honours list. I tried it out a long time ago and got some useful hits. However, some would say that its interface is not ideal. It's perhaps time someone did a proper precision and recall type study on chemistry search engines, but easy-to-use tools for end-users tend to have different requirements from those imposed by information professionals. Are you going to the Chicago ACS meeting? The session on portals is likely to address this subject. Wendy Dr. Wendy A. Warr Wendy Warr & Associates, 6 Berwick Court Holmes Chapel, Cheshire, CW4 7HZ, England Tel/fax +44 (0) 1477 533837 wendy@warr.com http://www.warr.com 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)
Hi, I looked for "Antibiotic sesquiterpenes" in www.scirus.com and found 183 documents. They were highly relevant. But when I looked for "Sankey diagrams", the results were poor. However, this is very good search engine. Regards, Jerzy Krol-Bogomilski http://www.geocities.com/jerzor/ --- "Rzepa, Henry" <h.rzepa@ic.ac.uk> wrote:
Elsevier have recently announced http://www.scirus.com/, "a powerful new search engine developed for locating scientific information only"
Of course, that is a bold claim, and can only be tested by conducting some searches. No doubt, the nature of the search will strongly influence the result.
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo! Messenger http://phonecard.yahoo.com/ 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)
participants (3)
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Jerzy Krol-Bogomilski
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Rzepa, Henry
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Wendy Warr