Google Date range searching

Have you ever tried Google’s date range searching and been annoyed with the results - did it come up with old pages when you only wanted recent ones? I certainly did and stopped ever using date range searching. Hopefully thats a thing of the past now though. As of May this year Google changed the date range syntax slightly. Before Google date marked a page when it was added to the Index AND whenever it was refreshed in the Index, i.e. when it gets reindexed. Now things have changes so that a webpage is only found on one date only - the one when it was originally added to Google’s index.

What does this mean? Well if you were searching for stories on, lets say, HIV Integrase inhibitors, now you only get webpages that were created in the last 3 months, as opposed to news stories that were published 5 years ago and are part of a web page that was updated in the last 3 months. It’s not fail safe - after all maybe Google, for whatever reason, only recently indexed an old page for the first time in the last 3 months, but on the whole it seems to work pretty well.

Symyx to acquire MDL

News for all the chemists out there is that Elsevier have sold MDL to Symyx
(including Beilstein/Crossfire) .

What does that mean? Well I guess it may lead to better bench tools for chemists and better integration with lab hardware/software. Will it mean less emphasis on database development? Possibly though MDL’s databases never seemed to be big sellers somehow (with the exception of Beilstein of course).

I’ve always thought that MDL interfaces could do with some cleaning up and modernization (not that I have had much of a change to play with Discoverygate which of course is their web interface) so hopefully with a better understanding of the needs of bench chemist’s that’s what Symyx will do.
MDL never seemed a terribly good fit with Elsevier somehow whose primary markets are not chemists.  Time will tell if it turns out to be better or worse for customers.

Google tip #5- Customized Search

Google recently introduced the customized search feature. This allows you to basically decide what sites a particular search page is going to search across. You can use to add in particular keywords to every search and/or select which webpages are crawled.

Lets say, for example, that you are interested in kinases. You could choose 20 or so sites that you regularly check out and add them to your kinase customized search engine. Then you, or anyone else who you give the URL to, can search across just those sites.

What’s the advantage - well if you commonly search for a common term and get false drops then limiting what you are searching will help.

Anyway, here’s my attempt at a kinase site…(first pass, probably needs some refinement…)

Kinase search engine

Citation searching

One of the services I provide to clients is citation searching - i.e. identifying papers that cite a paper of interest. This is often in support of Visa applications to prove a person’s scientific credibility.

Over the last few years I’ve come to use Google Scholar more and more over the traditional Science Citation Index. I have to admit that Google Scholar does a much better job than I had imagined it would. My only quip with it is that there is no simple way to output your results - which means that if like me you need to send out a report you end up doing a lot of cutting and pasting.

So I have to hand it to Google - Scholar is a great service content wise but it could really benefit from some TLC on output and format.

Here are some results that I recently had using both services and some general comments about the Pros and Cons of each.

Science Citation Index vs. Google Scholar