Scirus Blends Public, Private STM Realms

摘要

Don't underestimate the power of brand-name recognition. Take the case of two similar search engines, for example. Both cover scholarly and technical content; both cover public Web sites and proprietary, deep Web material; both include free and fee-based items; and both have a variety of search options. One, however, covers much more information and has greatly superior search capabilities and substantially more full text. The other is associated with the biggest name in Web searching. The former is Scirus, a scientific/technical/medical (STM) search engine from publishing giant Elsevier; the second is Google Scholar. Although Scirus (http://www.scirus.com) has been around longer and is provided by one of the pre-eminent STM publishers, which one do you think is better known? (Hint: Do a Google search.)