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Turning Search Into a Science – If you’re looking for scientific information on the Web, Google might not be the best choice. Many researchers instead turn to Scirus.

When genetic researchers do a Web search for Dolly, the subject of their query probably doesn’t have the last name Parton, nor is it likely a magazine for the fun-loving Australian girl who wants to know the latest on everything from fashion and beauty to entertainment news.

By Kristen Philipkoski

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,62979,00.html

But a Google search http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=dolly will turn up these results and lots of other noise, unless the researcher specifies that results should not include Parton or fashion but must include cloning. Instead, a scientist could use a search engine like Scirus http://www.scirus.com , which specifically taps science resources and publications.

Scirus is a search engine for scientists that allows them to dig through not just scientific journals, but also unpublished research, university websites, corporate Internet sites, conference agendas and minutes, discussion groups and mailing-list archives.

"It’s good for scientists who don’t want to sink time into fruitless searches," said David Carpe, founder of Clew http://www.clew.us , a research and consulting firm in Boston. "(Web searches) are only one piece to the research they’re doing; it shouldn’t take five weeks to find the information they need."

Scirus mines 167 million scientific Web pages to get query results. The technology uses linguistic analysis to rank the results, with the highest scientific value at the top. Scirus has been around since April 2001, and its popularity has been slowly but steadily growing. It was named best specialty search engine by SearchEngineWatch http://www.searchenginewatch.com in 2001 http://searchenginewatch.com/awards/article.php/2155891 . In 2003, the site accommodated about 30 million searches.

"What (our users) like is it really focuses searches on science websites, which means they have to deal with less nonsense on the Web, and it really reduces the time that they have to spend searching," said Ammy Vogtlander, product manager for Scirus in Amsterdam. "Another thing they really like is the number of very high-quality sources. We make sure those sources (are) ranked properly."

Many scientists default to PubMed http://www.pubmed.com , a medical journal database maintained by the National Library of Medicine. But vast as that database is, it will miss more-general articles.

"With the work I do, it is critical to keep my fingers on the pulse of general scientific interest in a scientific research area, so returning articles of general scientific interest found on the Web is also important," said Steven J. Smith, a senior scientist at Xenogen in Alameda, California, who recently discovered Scirus.

The Scirus search engine is free, but that’s not to say its owner, Elsevier http://www.elsevier.com , a giant in science publishing, doesn’t benefit from operating the science search tool. Elsevier publishes 20,000 journals, books, electronic products, services, databases and Web portals.

Scirus includes Elsevier publications, like BioMedNet http://www.bmn.com and ScienceDirect http://www.sciencedirect.com , in its results. Those results are ranked like any other, but also feature an eye-catching logo. Some results supply only an abstract, and require a fee to read the entire paper.

Vogtlander said Elsevier executives hope the search engine attracts students, who often are frustrated by mainstream search engines.

"(Half) of the users of mainstream search engines find the results insufficient or irrelevant for their (science-related) assignments," Vogtlander said.

Once a searcher gets results, Scirus suggests a list of focus options to further refine the search. For example, a search for "rat genome" comes up with refining options like "allele" and "genome sequencing."

John Moulton, a product development researcher at Gene Tools http://www.gene-tools.com in Philomath, Oregon, used Scirus recently when his company was getting ready for a new product launch. Gene Tools wanted to be able to announce that its main product, the Morpholino (a molecule that can turn off specific genes in model organisms like the zebrafish http://zfin.org/cgi-bin/webdriver?MIval=aa-ZDB_home.apg ), was referenced in scientific papers more than 500 times.

"I needed 80 or 90 more references in a matter of a few weeks," Moulton said. "I started using Scirus every day for a while." The Gene Tools website now boasts 630 journal references to the Morpholino.

"Almost every link (Scirus) handed back was great," he said.

Scirus searches are fueled by Fast Search & Transfer’s Fast ESP http://www.fastsearch.com , a technology specifically tailored for specialized searchers. More-focused searching is a growing trend, said Nate Treloar, vice president of technical sales at Fast.

"With Scirus we’re seeing a glimpse into the future with these sort of research applications that blend some of the more analytical applications with text mining, which historically has only been available to analysts and people who were able to put on these 3-D goggles and navigate through cyberspace," he said.

If not a trend, Scirus is at least evidence that there’s more to searching the Internet than Google, Carpe said.

"The general belief is if you can’t find it on Google, it doesn’t exist, which is sad," he said.

Carpe places Scirus somewhere between a Google or Yahoo search and the type of deep Internet searches researchers can do with sites like CompletePlanet http://www.completeplanet.com and Invisible Web http://www.invisible-web.net .

Although Google’s special searches section http://www.google.com/options/specialsearches.html offers more-focused categories — including U.S. government, Linux, BSD Unix, Microsoft and Apple Macintosh — it probably won’t help much in a science search.

"That’s good if you’re looking at these five things," Carpe said. "But to search for an ointment for erectile dysfunction, and you’re a researcher at some manufacturing firm that follows this, you’ll be better off at Scirus."

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