Google Life Sciences Search Engine

Google now allows you to create custom search engines. I used this to set up a search engine that searches in well know life sciences sites.

In most cases normal web searches work fine. But sometimes you have terms that are frequently used in other contexts, e.g. hedgehog or ada…

Google’s custom search engines are based on lists of URLs (or URL patterns) of sites that should be included. I suppose that behind the scene Google runs a normal web search, but filters out sites that are not included in the list.

The initial list of sites for the life sciences search engine was based on a file that lists all sites that are referenced from a popular, well-linked life sciences database.

grep ^Server dbxref.txt | perl -lne 'print $1 if m{http://(.+?)/}' | sort | uniq

If you’d like to add any sites, let me know (you can also request to participate in this search engine via Google).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 19:31 and is filed under Life Science, Programming. The content of this entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “Google Life Sciences Search Engine”

  1. Antony Williams Says:
    September 9th, 2007 at 18:34

    Eric, Do you see any value in integrating http://www.chemspider.com into the search engine especially since we just published 17.6 million InChI keys

    http://www.chemspider.com/blog/?p=125

  2. Eric Jain Says:
    September 10th, 2007 at 09:34

    Done! I’ll also send you an invite if you want to add or change anything in future…

  3. Satnam Alag Says:
    April 27th, 2008 at 22:57

    Eric,
    You may also want to add NextBio http://www.nextbio.com to your search engine. NextBio is a life science search engine that enables researchers and clinicians to access and understand the world’s life sciences information.

    With NextBio, in just one click you can search through thousands of studies with billions of data points spanning across different experimental platforms, organisms and data types. NextBio also searches across millions of publications to help you find new articles pertaining to your query. NextBio’s search engine makes massive amounts of disparate biological, clinical and chemical data from public and proprietary sources searchable, regardless of data type and origin, and empowers scientists to quickly understand their own experimental results within the context of other research.

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