Wikia and GoPubMed – New kids on the search engine block

Posted January 7th, 2008 by Konrad Förstner

Wikia search, the search engine of Jimmy Wales‘ company Wikia, is now online as an alpha version. Everything is very basic so far – no much functionality, content or eye-candy. It relies on user contributions and is supposed to be open and transparent.

Life scientists have a (new) tool to search for literature: GoPubMed. Many others have already reported about and I just found it via this posting (sometime I am quite resistant :)). The press release tells us:

This, the first semantic search engine, reduces search time by up to 90%. By sorting search results it enables scientists to answer biomedical questions in completely new way.

I played around a little bit and think it is really functional and fancy. Funnily “shot gun sequencing” in one of my papers leads to the key word “Firearms”. Recently Folksonomy 4 Science was included which “allows users to identify experts in the biomedical field and gain important information on recent research topics by viewing their networks.”

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