http://www.scirus.com/ as a Scientific search engine

[Rzepa, Henry]

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 at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe chemweb
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)