Another New Science Search Engine Available

What's up with all these science search engines all of a sudden? Check out http://www.search4science.com/, which its press release says contains around 50,000 scientific words and expressions.

The presentation of the search engine is interesting. You're given two query input boxes. The first box is for the main word or phrase, and the second is for any additional information. In the first box I put nerve and in the second box reconstruction.

After you've entered information in the query box, you're given the option to do direct search or dynamic search (which, I see, is pat pend.) The direct search took me to the first of a list of over 21100 results that was powered by Google. (Even though there were over 21100 results found, there were only four pages of results. Going over to Google and doing a search for nerve reconstruction also found 21100 results. In fact, the two initial pages of search results matched.)

The dynamic search takes you to a "power search" type page, where you're given the option to enter words related to your query. Words are also suggested to you. In the case of my nerve reconstruction query, I was given the option to include the words human and synapse. I chose synapse, and added microsurgery as well. These results, which were powered by FAST, were much worse than the results I got from my initial search.

Curious, I went back to the direct search for nerve as the primary word, and reconstruction microsurgery as the secondary words. I got excellent results. Adding synapse clouded the waters, though -- apparently synapse is not a good word when researching reconstructive nerve surgery. Doing a dynamic search without the word synapse yielded good results, though not, to a casual survey, as good as the Google/direct search results.

You can narrow your search results into categories. At the upper part of the page there's a drop down menu that allows you to specify categories. For example, you may go to the physics category and search for quantum (main word) cat (additional information). You'll get about half the results you'd get if you went to Google and did the same search.

This idea is intriguing, and I like the categorized searches and two tiers of information input. It'll be interesting to see how it evolves. Worth a look.

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