New Search Engine Only Features Science Information

With billions of pages of information online, Web users often use search engines like Google to find what they're looking for. But sometimes a general purpose search engine isn't what you need.

If you're a scientist, for example, you'll want to use a search engine specifically designed for your needs, such as our Website of the Week, Scirus.com.

CAWLEY: "Scirus is a science-specific search engine. So it allows researchers to search for scientific information only. We don't just use web crawling, but we also index important university and research institute databases. Some say it's the deep scientific web, and that's really where Scirus can take you."

Stephen Cawley is product marketing manager for Scirus. To deliver targeted results, Scirus searches through nearly half a billion web pages, including academic journals, patents and other content that general purpose search engines simply don't deliver.

And if your search returns too many hits, you can refine it using tools that appear alongside the search results.

CAWLEY: "If you look at the left-hand side of the screen, you can actually see the different types of content, whether it's patents, journals, whether it's web pages, and how many of that type of content is actually returned on the search result."

More than a million users a month take advantage of Scirus's search function, and now they have a new way to use the site: topic pages with essays written by experts on a wide and expanding range of subjects. Cawley says topics.scirus.com, which is still in the beta [testing] stage of development, combines the expert narrative with relevant search results.

CAWLEY: "So the Scirus search index does an analysis of the title of this topic page and then actually returns related results. So, if you like, the topic page acts as a waypoint for researchers, where experts give their expert recommendations on what content should actually be explored."

Stephen Cawley stresses that although Scirus is a product of one of the leading scientific publishers, Elsevier, the search results are delivered without any bias.