They Blinded Me With Scirus

Elsevier Science has announced the launching of Scirus ( http://www.scirus.com), its scientific search engine. (I looked at the preview version on December 7 of last year -- http://www.researchbuzz.com/news/2000/dec7dec1300.html)

Covering over 60 million pages, Scirus claims to locate more Web information and controlled information than can be found with "generic search engines." I went ahead and did the search I did last December, for "adrenal insulin uptake." I had the option to search in one or more of several categories, including Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Medicine, and Physics. I got 1,259 results, in three tabs: all results (the default tab), membership results (for which you have to be a ScienceDirect subscriber) and Web results.

The advanced search (which crashed Opera twice but worked fine in Mozilla) offered the ability to build a query through Boolean drop-down menus. It also allows you to specify what kind of page should be searched (all, article, or scientist homepage), which data collection (Web, membership sources, or both) and the year the material was published (only relevant if you're searching the membership sources collection.)

All result pages allow you to save results, e-mail individual results, or see more entries like that individual result. There are also recommended search enhancements at the bottom of the page which you may click on.

This a cool idea but I have just one tiny quibble. Scirus says in its about page: "Scirus excludes sites that contain no scientific content." That's either slightly incorrect or they have an incredibly flexible sense of scientific content. The phrase "purple pieman" found 17 results. The phrase "pez collection" found 41 results. And the phrase "Xena Warrior Princess" found over 1,700 results, and the first one was for xenafan.com .

This isn't a major complaint; it's hard to make an airtight search engine and the content for the most part is very good. It looks like most of the problem is caused by an indiscriminate crawling of .edu sites --Scirus might want to adjust their spiders a bit.

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