LibraryJournal.com (www.libraryjournal.com) announced on October 15 that Elsevier Science (www.elsevier.com) is throwing down the gauntlet to Google users, challenging them to switch to its Scirus search engine (www.scirus.com) when surfing the web for scientific information. In addition to searching more than 167 million science-specific web pages, Scirus covers 18 million full-text articles and abstracts from journal sources that include Medline, ScienceDirect, BioMed Central and pre-print archives. Elsevier says that Scirus includes more coverage of proprietary and Open Access Initiative sources than any other free search engine.
Amanda Spiteri, marketing director of Elsevier's ScienceDirect, said that Scirus now has attracted more than one million users worldwide, which is a number "beyond expectations." Spiteri echoed many academic librarians' frustrations, decrying the use of Google by graduate-level students and even professionals to perform serious research. She claims that while Google has numerous adequate functions, it isn't designed for scientific inquiry, and joked that it's great if you want to order a pizza, but not for performing research. Spiteri believes that the best proof of Scirus's scientific search mastery over Google and others is for users simply to run identical searches on both "and let them see for themselves."
Among Spiteri's reasons for claiming Scirus's superiority over Google is that its bibliometric identifiers used in searching recognize keywords in a matching site and rank the site according to terms and links. When valuing a term, Scirus measures the location and frequency of the term within a document, checking specifically if the term appears in the title, how many times it's used, and its location in the text. But the search engine doesn't just search pure science sites and publications, it also looks for search terms in social science, business, and legal sources that provide related information.
