Co-founders don’t always agree 
. Actually this is just me getting back at Hari for dissing Facebook. In a recent blog post, Hari points to a collaboration between RefSeq and UniProt. At the end of the post he writes (emphasis mine)
This simple announcment also brings to the fore once again the complex inter-relationships between a lot of life-science data and why I dont think there will ever be a single google styled life-science database.
I agree there will never be a single life science database, nor there should ever be. My disagreement lies with the Google bit. Google is not a single database, but rather an engine that finds distributed data. In other words, what we need is a google for the life sciences; an engine that is capable of aggregating all the worlds life science information.
Technorati Tags: Life Science, Search, Hari Jayaram
4 Comments
I just am cautiously skeptical of any such one size fits all solutions for the life-sciences-not that you are recommending such a solution.
I guess the one area where life-science databases fall short of google is in ease of use for even simple queries . It only gets worse when your queries have to cross multiple databases. I can see your point as to how an umbrella engine that cross searchers and presents its results with a rich interface , the so called “google for bio” would be a godsend.
But somehow I cannot yet conceive how such an all-singing all dancing search tool could come about without collaborations between the big-wigs like the NCBI and the EBI.
What makes Google work are the standards around web documents, i.e. the W3C standards. That’s why I am such a big fan of standards. It is also why, like you, I am not sure if we will ever see a generalized search engine for the life sciences.
I just am cautiously skeptical of any such one size fits all solutions for the life-sciences-not that you are recommending such a solution.
I guess the one area where life-science databases fall short of google is in ease of use for even simple queries . It only gets worse when your queries have to cross multiple databases. I can see your point as to how an umbrella engine that cross searchers and presents its results with a rich interface , the so called “google for bio” would be a godsend.
But somehow I cannot yet conceive how such an all-singing all dancing search tool could come about without collaborations between the big-wigs like the NCBI and the EBI.
What makes Google work are the standards around web documents, i.e. the W3C standards. That's why I am such a big fan of standards. It is also why, like you, I am not sure if we will ever see a generalized search engine for the life sciences.