By Chris Sherman Executive Editor, August 26, 2002
Elsevier Science and Fast Search & Transfer have launched a new release of Scirus, a science-specific Web search engine that won Search Engine Watch's Best Specialty Search Engine Award in 2001.
The new version adds more subject-specific content and features like expanded information types, dynamic teasers which highlight the search terms within the search result list, and improved relevance ranking.
"As we continue to examine ways to improve the search service for scientists, we have executed a study amongst the target audience to find out what they find most important for a dedicated science search engine," said Femke Markus, Product Manager of Scirus.
The index now contains over 107 million science specific pages, with new full-text additions like NASA reports, CogPrints pre- and postprints, and preprints from the Chemistry and Mathematics Preprint Servers. According to the press release, Scirus now offers over 17 million proprietary records that cannot be found using generic search engines.
The new information types search limiters are "company homepages" and "preprints." The preprints filter looks particularly useful, allowing searchers to access papers that are available before the peer-review process has been completed.
As part of this new release, Scirus now includes a news feed with the latest science headlines provided by the Lexis Nexis Web Publisher News Database. This service provides access to newspapers, trade journals, reference directories, legal and legislative sources, newswires and transcripts from over 2,700 sources around the world.
Scirus
http://www.scirus.com
Scirus - A New Science Search Engine
SearchDay, May 14th, 2001
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/01/sd0516-scirus.html
Combining a targeted crawler from FAST that focuses only on web sites with scientific content, with Elsevier's massive scientific information resources drawn from thousands of journals and books, Scirus is a hybrid search engine that's useful to amateur and professional alike.
Scirus: 2001 Best Specialty Search Engine
http://searchenginewatch.com/awards/2001-winners.html?source=sday#specialty
Scirus was the 2001 winner of the Best Specialty Search Engine in the Search Engine Watch awards. This category recognizes the best search engine providing results in a particular topical area. No actual search engines were listed on the voting form. Instead, voters were asked to "write-in" a search engine they liked and comment about why it was good.
Specialty Search Engines: Science Search Engines
http://searchenginewatch.com/links/Specialty_Search_Engines/Science_Search_Engines/
A list of science-specific search engines.
NOTE: Article links often change. In case of a bad link, use the publication's search facility, which most have, and search for the headline.
