It’s not just the EBI

The Omics World has a post about the relevance of the NCBI as a vertical search engine for biology. While I prefer the new EBI interface, one has to agree that the NCBI offers a vast number of useful resources for the skilled researcher. Historically, my biggest problem with NCBI has been the user interface. For some reason, and this is still true, it has always appeared too busy and somewhat unintuitive. That said the new Entrez search engine has definitely improved, and is much more usable than in the past. The NCBI has one big thing going for it, at least in my book. Pubmed continues to be the best resource for life science literature. It is for good reason that I spend every Monday morning going through my saved searches and looking at new papers for any number of keyword combinations.

However, even today, when I want to look for papers by a particular author or on a particular subject, I tend to use Google. For one, the search is a lot more comprehensive. In most cases, the top hits are highly relevant and papers can be found quite easily (often by linking the the Pubmed hit). What would be good is an addition to Google OneBox that adds NCBI results to a Google search for a specific query. That might be a great way to make the results from NCBI and/or EBI more accessible. With browsers now containing a default Google box, that will always remain the fastest and most likely means of scientific search. If we can figure out how to empower the researcher through the Google front end, or a domain specific integrative search engine, it might just be the best way forward.

Technorati Tags: NCBI, EBI, Search, Life Science, Google, Pubmed