We've heard for years about the invisible, hidden, deep or dark web -- that portion of the web that resides in databases and other formats not accessible to search engine spiders. One of the latest attempts to make this content searchable is DeepDyve, formerly known as Infovell.
DeepDyve offers a federated search of a wide variety of content, some of which is free and some requires payment to the publisher. Sources include MEDLINE, Clinical Trials, PubMed Central, BioOne and SAGE Publications - some heavy-hitters. Searchers can limit their search to various slices of this content, such as legal, business & finance, life sciences, or clean tech and energy.
What sets DeepDyve apart is how it handles text and queries. The founders of the company worked on the Human Genome Project prior to starting Infovell, and they approach search differently than most. For DNA research, scientists must take small snippets of genetic material and match them together. To the information processing algorithm, the actual meaning of the terms didn't matter; it's looking for patterns. DeepDyve takes that same language agnosticism to offer a very different approach to textual analysis than the usual syntactic analysis.
Like Yahoo's Y!Q, DeepDyve is designed to work with a block of text rather than just a few search terms to find useful information. Given its founders' background, it's not surprising that DeepDyve can even handle searching for chemical formulas; in fact, you can point it to a collection of articles you have selected from a prior search and say, in essense, "These are all helpful. Find me more like them."
DeepDyve requires (free) registration for its basic version; the Pro version, which costs $45/month, includes additional search and display features but no additional content.
Hi Mary - Thanks for the post about us! Glad to see you making good use of our long query abilities...I hope you find them useful.
You might be interested to know that we actually significantly redid our interface a few weeks ago, and we took off the registration requirement.
Be sure to get in touch if you have any questions or run into any difficulties.
Thanks again!
Posted by: Steven Lybeck | March 13, 2009 at 06:45 PM
Mary Ellen,
The Deep Web has garnered a lot of attention recently. I just want to make you and your readers aware of the efforts of my company which I founded in 2002, Deep Web Technologies, to make the "deep web" more accessible through the use of our Federated Search technology. We have developed quite a few prominent sites which give the public access to some of the best content on the deep web:
http://www.science.gov
http://www.worldwidescience.org
http://www.scitopia.org
http://www.biznar.com
http://www.mednar.com
I hope that you enjoy your visit to the Land of Enchantment in a couple of weeks.
Abe
Posted by: Abe Lederman | March 14, 2009 at 02:36 PM