Penn State College researchers have created a search engine called ChemxSeer that hunts for molecules online. For instance, the engine can distinguish between He for helium and “he” as in a person. The engine can also identify terms for chemical molecules that can be represented in different ways (say CH4 or H4C), whereas a typical search engine couldn’t figure that out.
"Results from our search engine are much more relevant than results returned by popular search engines," said C. Lee Giles, professor of information sciences and technology and co-director of the IST Cyber Infrastructure Lab where the research originated, in a statement. "It is one of several cyber tools under development in our lab which will enable better access to and sharing of information and data among scientists and scholars."
The tool is outlined in the paper "Extraction and Search of Chemical Formulae in Text Documents on the Web," which was presented at the recent 16th International World Wide Web Conference in Alberta, Canada.
ChemxSeer builds on expertise gained through creating CiteSeer, a search engine for academic and science documents.
The engine is part of an open-source project focusing on chemical document search and is funded by the National Science Foundation.
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