Commentary: On scientific search

Arpan Jhaveri • October 22, 2005

Commentary: On scientific search

It should come as no surprise that most scientific searches begin with major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. But are these the best tools a researcher can use in his or her discovery process, and do they provide the best results? The answer, according to some industry specialists, is no, and as a result "specialized" search engines have been making inroads into the search space. Two types of search engines have developed to fill the gap – vertical search engines and community based search engines.

A vertical search engine is a search engine in the traditional sense with the exception that the set of information indexed is constrained to niche topics. An example of a specialized search engine is Scirus [1]. Scirus, like Google Scholar, attempts to provide results more relevant to a researcher by indexing scientific content only.

Community based search engines are a bit different, for the search results are defined by the combined knowledge base of a community. The underlying assumption for community-based search engines is based on the premise that the community or ones peers consistently provide the most relevant information.

Two examples of community-based search engines are Connotea [2] and Siphs [3]. Connotea, is a social bookmarking service for the scientific community whose search is based upon tagging content. Search becomes a matter of finding the appropriate tag, and viewing all content cataloged against it. One may assume that, since content is tagged by members of the scientific community itself that that content is among the most relevant.

Siphs, focused exclusively on the life sciences community, takes a slight twist on this approach. Rather than tagging content, Siphs asks researchers to identify their respective "area of expertise." In this scenario, a researcher looking to conduct a search would simply search for other Siphs members with the right set of expertise, and pose his or her inquiry to them. In essence, this mimics the offline world, in that the best results come from people with the right set of experiences.

Of course, each method is not mutually exclusive of each other. With the growing number of tools on the web, finding scientific information has never been easier.

References:
1. http://www.scirus.com
2. http://www.connotea.org
3. http://www.siphs.com

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