Zoi-Sci

Okay not a bio utility, but I’m sure this one will be useful. If you are a Del.icio.us user, your bookmarks are unorganized and messy, and it takes time to retrieve the right information, all you need is deliGoo. As the name suggests, it mashes up Del.ici.ous and Google search to create a search engine for your del.ici.ous bookmarks. Works fine with both Firebox (2.0+) and Internet Explorer (6.0+).

It searches sites according to your del.icio.us bookmarks and retrieve useful pages by a word or a phrase it contains as well as creates customized Google search engine using any del.icio.us tag. Found via SoulSoup

I quite frequently come across blog posts on Medical/ Bioscience 2.0, some of which I have been bookmarking on del.ici.ous or on my personal “To try” folder for later use. With growing number, it has become difficult to track and organize them. I’ve always thought of making a blog post listing all my favorite ones together for my personal reference. Well that seems a daunting task. So, I’m listing some vertical bio search engines to start with.

Though there is a growing number of vertical search engine catering the needs of health science field, but I find that the number is relatively less for biosciences like biotechnology, molecular biology etc., considering the huge community of scientists and students in the field. Most of the old ones are either closed or outdated or simply not impressive enough (Duh! Do I need to provide the link when most of the links are not even working?). I mostly use Google and del.icio.us for my requirements, but I’m on always on a look-out for a decided bio search engine, good enough to make me stick to it for a long time..

Here’s a small collection of few links to vertical search engines in the field of biosciences, which can be used to get more specific hits than broad-based engines like Google.

BioHunt Molecular Biology finder

The database has been automatically created by the Marvin molecular biology sites retrieval robot. Some non relevant documents may sometimes appear.

Kosmix Health

Though this is a health science search section of Kosmix, I found that it gives relevant and well-organized info for bio terms too. To be precise – it instantly creates a homepage for the searched term. Saw this on the “About us” page of the site:

Every organization has a home page on the Web today.
Every user can have a home page on the Web today.
Why not every topic?
At Kosmix, that is what we are all about.
Our focus and passion is simple…
“Build the Unofficial Home Page for Every Topic on the Web”
A starting point for you to explore any topic on the Web

Kosmic review from Mashable:

Kosmix will be powering search for Revolution Health, in order to bring more relevant and up-to-date information regarding treatments, medical conditions and other health-related topics. The goal is to provide better search results than those you’d get from a general web search, and aims to give more targeted content with site-specific resources including articles and clinical trials. This is another example of how online communities can benefit from niche search engines that are more in line with what the end user needs.

BioText

This is a promising project from University of Berkeley (recently published) to develop a flexible, efficient, platform-independent database system infrastructure tailored to the search needs of bioscientists. Their goal is impressive, and I believe that this is what exactly a bioresearcher/ scientist has been wishing for.

• Continuously updated database of articles.
• Systematic integration of synonym matching and normalization.
• Systematic integration with community-accepted lexical ontologies.
• Entity tagging (e.g., protein/gene, receptor, ligand, etc. ).
• Relationship tagging (e.g., treatment-for, binds-to, mutation-of, create-bond, etc).
• “Slicing and dicing’’ subsets of the collection.
• Customization of search setup.
• Flexible, intuitive user interface.

Click here for a detailed description here.

NextBio

Nextbio is the latest one, which I first saw on Scienceroll and appears to be quite useful. This explains it all:

NextBio is a web-based scientific data search engine that offers instant access, search and collaboration across a vast repository of life sciences information. Our query interface makes it easy to ask questions about genes, pathways, study results, disease areas, compound treatments and biomarkers, just to name a few.

It claims to have the largest knowledge base of genomics, proteomics and other specially processed biological, chemical and clinical experimental study results. Another important feature is it also enables researchers and clinicians to import and store their own data to find new insights. You can view a demo here.

Apart from being a life sciences data search engine, it is a community data sharing platform, providing the web 2.0 paradigm of instant access, user-generated content and collaboration to life scientists and clinicians worldwide. It is rapidly gaining popularity with users in over 60 academic institutes and pharmaceutical/ biotechnology companies.

It recently announced its closing of a $7M Series B funding led by Newbury Ventures. The new funds will be used for the further expansion of the search engine. (via)

If you are bored of all these, try searching me and my network on Lijit.

Talking about trust factor as mentioned in bbgm blog, if not me, you can trust my network for relevancy . Well Seriously speaking, I found it cool and will put up the widget on side bar soon.

If you are a science video freak like me but find searching good quality video on sites like Youtube a time-consuming affair, here’s a search engine called ScienceHack by Rami Nasser, exclusively for science videos.

A pivotal feature of science hack is that every video is reviewed by a scientist, so it claims to fetch you relevant and high quality science videos.

Now in alpha release, you can help it get bigger and better by sending feedback and good science videos or links.

Try searching some videos of topics your interest or just browse through to bump into something new and interesting (like I just did ).

Found via My Biotech Life

With public wikis, such as Wikipedia, becoming more complex and info-enriched, it may sometimes become confusing and take time to find the desired info.

WikiMindmap comes to your rescue by helping you create a auto-mindmap of the wiki topic of your choice. It searches any term on Wikipedia and automatically creates a structured and easy understandable overview of the Wikipedia page of that term.

Currently, you can search and access Wikipedia upto 5 languages and only MediaWiki type wikis. If you want to suggest additional public wiki, you may drop a mail @list_at_wikimindmap_dot_org

Wikimindmap, originally uploaded by daisyrable.

I typed in the word “Genetics” and you can see the overview of the wiki pages of “Genetics” topic as a mindmap with the main sections as nodes and expandable branch, revealing details. You can go to the corresponding Wikipedia link by clicking on a topic. It even gives a preview of the page content by pointing the cursor to the selected topic. I think that this will be helpful in searching required info quickly in my field. Try out yourself with topic of your choice and explore other features.

Came to know of this via Soulsoup, and thought of using this for genetics.