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

[Wendy Warr]

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 at warr.com  http://www.warr.com



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