© eScience World J. Lib. Inf. & Comm. Tech. ISSN: 0975-3168 Vol. 2: (1-2) June,2010 SCIENCE SEARCH ENGINES TO MINE SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION FROM THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY G. Rathinasabapathy 1, L.Rajendran 2, J. Arumugam 3 and M.S. Prem Raj 4 *** ABSTRACT The Internet is a huge network of millions of computer networks spread across the globe and the information available on the network is increasing in a fast manner. Especially, the scientific information available on the Internet is increasing steadily. Though the major search engines available on the Internet to search across the information superhighway viz., Google, Alta Vista, Ask, Bing, Cuil, Duck Duck Go, Kosmix, Yebo, etc., are very efficient search tools, there are some special scientific search engines available on the Information Superhighway which will produce more relevant and effective results for those who are searching scientific information on the Internet. In this context, a thorough search has been made using various general purpose search engines including Google, science directories and portals. The results had been consolidated, duplication eliminated and unique search engines are tabulated with their name and URLs. This paper attempts to profile some of the important science search engines available on the Information Superhighway useful for students, research scholars, faculty and scientists who are using the Internet for scientific information retrieval. Keywords: Internet, Science Search Engines, Scientific search, Gateways, Portals ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Internet The Internet plays a vital role in all walks of life and it powerfully leverages our ability to find, manage, and share information. Never before in human history has such a valuable resource been available to so many people at such little cost. In fact there is no doubt about it. The use of Internet by people is increasing tremendously. In Africa, users of Internet in 2000 were 4,515,400 only whereas in 2009 it was 991,002,342, almost 1809.80% increase. In case of Asia, it was 114,304,000 in 2000 and it was 3,808,070,503 in 2009 which was about 568.80% increase. The number of users of the Internet in 2000 at Europe was 114,304,000 but it increased to 803,850,858 in 2009 which is about 305.10% increase. Middle East is also showing a huge increase in the use of Internet since the users were 3,284,800 in 2000 and it was 202,687,005 in 2009 which is about 1675.10% increase. Similarly, the users are increasing steadily in North America (140.10%), Latin America/Caribbean (934.50%) and Oceania/Australia (177%). The total users of the Internet across the globe in 2000 were 360,985,492 in 2000 and 6,767,805,208 in 2009 which is a 399.30% increase. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Deputy Librarian 2. Assistant Librarian 3. Senior Research Fellow 4. Research Associate, Dept. of Library Science, Madras Veterinary College, Chennai-7 Journal of Library, Information and 19 June, 2010 Communication Technology © eScience World J. Lib. Inf. & Comm. Tech. ISSN: 0975-3168 Vol. 2: (1-2) June,2010 Search Engines Search engines are the miracle of the Internet. These sophisticated tools seem to reach right into the global network, and scour its content at our command. The search results are usually presented in a list of results and are commonly called hits . The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike Web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human input. The very first tool used for searching on the Internet was Archie in 1990 and it was created by Alan Emtage at McGill University in Montreal. The rise of Gopher created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota led to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. Veronica ( Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead ( Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation and Display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers. In the summer of 1993, no search engine existed yet for the web, though numerous specialized catalogues were maintained by hand. Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva wrote a series of Perl scripts that would periodically mirror these pages and rewrite them into a standard format which formed the basis for W3Catalog, the web's first primitive search engine, released during 1993. W3Catalog was followed by ‘Wandex’, Aliweb and JumpStation in the year 1993. One of the first "full text" crawler-based search engines was Web Crawler, which came out in 1994. Another major search engine came into existence in 1994 was Lycos. Soon after, many search engines appeared and vied for popularity. These included Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light and AltaVista. Yahoo was among the most popular ways for people to find web pages of interest, but its search function operated on its web directory, rather than full-text copies of web pages. Information seekers could also browse the directory instead of doing a keyword-based search. The top five engines during the period were Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek, and Excite. But, Google started its role in 2000 and now, Google is the top search engine across the globe. In addition to general purpose search engines, there are a number of Meta search engines like Brainboost, ChunkIt, Clustry, Dogpile, Excite, Harvester42, HotBot, Info.com, Ixquick, Kayak, LeapFish, Mamma, Metacrawler, MetaLib, Mobissimo, Myriad Search, SideStep, Turbo10, WebCrawler, DeeperWeb, etc. Advantages of using Search Engines There are three very compelling advantages of most search engines viz., (i) The indexes of search engines are usually vast, representing significant portions of the Internet, offering a wide variety and quantity of information resources; (ii) The growing sophistication of search engine software enables us to precisely describe the information that we seek; and Journal of Library, Information and 20 June, 2010 Communication Technology © eScience World J. Lib. Inf. & Comm. Tech. ISSN: 0975-3168 Vol. 2: (1-2) June,2010 (iii) The large number and variety of search engines enriches the Internet, making it at least appear to be organized. However, these search engines which are known as general purpose search engines and Meta Search Engines are not much useful for those who are looking for scientific information on the World Wide Web. Therefore, it is highly essential that they should make use of the special search engines available for scientific search, the science search engines. Science Search Engines The Internet provides a number of scientific search engines to cater to the information requirements of scientific community. Since the general purpose search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc., returns huge numbers of hits (sometimes one million and above) as results, it is humanly impossible to anyone to logon to all of those sites to find the information required. In this context, the scientific search engines available for almost all disciplines like medical science, biological science, chemical science, life sciences, etc., play a vital role to mine scientific information available on the Internet. Although lots of free resources are available on the web, hunting for a desired application often takes time, frustrating and probably don't find the best resources we are looking for. General Scientific Search Engines People who are interested to search relevant and accurate scientific information from the web can make use of Scirus (http://www.scirus.com), one of the most comprehensive scientific research tool or search engine on the web. Scirus with over 370 million scientific items indexed at last count, allows researchers to search for not only journal content but also scientists’ homepages, courseware, pre-print server materials, patents and institutional repository an web site information. Another important scientific search engine is Scholar Google (http://scholar.google.com). The following table provides some of the important scientific search engines available on the Information Superhighway. Science Search Engines S.No. Search Engine URL 1 Scirus http://www.scirus.com 2 Scholar Google http://scholar.google.co.in 3 SciNet http://www.scinet.cc 4 SciSeek http://www.sciseek.com 5 World Wide Science http://worldwidescience.org 7 Science Search http://www.science-search.org 9 Science Advisor http://science-advisor.net Journal of Library, Information and 21 June, 2010 Communication Technology © eScience World J. Lib. Inf. & Comm. Tech. ISSN: 0975-3168 Vol. 2: (1-2) June,2010 Medical Science Search Engines A paradigm shift has taken place in medical science as the Internet has fundamentally changed the relationship between providers and consumers of health care. It has done this by providing access to clinical information for both groups, thus potentially enabling consumers to question as well as challenge providers, participate in decisions and make informed choices. There is no doubt that the Internet provides tangible support to healthcare providers in a number of roles. However, the Internet resources are a blend of good and bad and known for its quality issues.