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.
Categories: Google · Search Engines · Searching
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
Categories: Google · Search Engines · Searching · kinase
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
Categories: Citation searching · Google · Search Engines · Searching
Fairly new to Google is the Google Book search. If like me you’ve taken only a quick look at it you may have only gotten mediocre results. Now I know a little more about it and what you can get so let me fill you in…
The books are scanned/uploaded from two main sources - associated publishers and libraries. Publishers provide the text of their recent in print books and Google has been scanning the libraries of major institutions such as Princeton and Harvard.
But what can you actually get? Well it’s all down to copyright. Here’s what I’ve learnt:
Pre-1923 - Copyright is not applicable and therefore full text is available and searchable e.g. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud
1923-Books in Print -The copyright situation is unclear and therefore only snippets are available e.g. What is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger
Books in Print - Generally the publisher will allow a “limited preview” and you can look at 20% of the book. Random pages are posted - so you cant search the whole book but you can search the pages that are posted. e.g. The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
So, now that I know a little more about this project I have to say I am pretty impressed. I don’t often have to search in books but its good to know that this resource is available.
Categories: Books · Google · Search Engines · Searching
