The ultimate search engine?
Nature Cell Biology · 2005
The need for improved internet searching has grown in direct proportion to the exponential growth of the web. Thus, Google was born to dominate the world of search engines to this day with its deceptively simple searches. The scientific literature is growing apace and the days where a researcher can stay on top of their field by reading across the relevant journals are numbered. We increasingly rely on the highly filtered searches of one of the most efficient engines on the block: PubMed ( www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi ). The main drawback is that it covers only abstracts and keywords. To address this serious shortcoming, Nature Publishing Group revamped its own search engines ( www.nature.com/dynasearch/app/dynasearch.taf ) to provide full access beyond the firewalls and introduced semantic text matching (the section labelled 'more articles like this' on abstract pages). Furthermore, 650 publishers assembled to form CrossRef ( www.crossref.org ), a non-profit service with the important aim of adding permanence to the web-based literature through a system of digital object identifiers (DOIs; www.doi.org ). CrossRef also launched a trial search engine ( www.crossref.org/crossrefsearch.html ) last year that permits full content searching of the participating 29 publishers (including NPG) on a Google platform.