Taking a DeepDyve into the Deep Web - Getting Practical
(Page 2 of 4 )
And then there’s the more prosaic aspect. Have you ever tried to hunt down medical research papers on the web? DeepDyve’s web site describes the process as “frustratingly limited and time-consuming.” An ordinary search engine won’t support the kind of complex queries real scientific researchers need to make. Worse, it can’t access the deep web for reasons I mentioned before. Is it any wonder that such engines will return too few, too many, or irrelevant results for this kind of research?
Sites with specialized research engines present their own problems. Aside from being expensive, they can be difficult to use. Not every researcher knows Boolean language as well as their favorite topic. But enough about the problems and how DeepDyve’s algorithm works; what is it like for the end user?
Well, you are required to register with an email address. Signing up is quick and painless (be sure to let them through your spam filter). Once you do, you get to see this pretty typical search screen:
I’d like to draw your attention to something very important that isn't typical: the search box. That’s not simply a box; it’s practically an entire apartment building when compared to most search engine text boxes. They’re not kidding when they say they’re set up to search long strings!
You can see that DeepDyve offers examples. I know the search engine will be optimized for those examples, but since I honestly didn’t have a better query in mind, I clicked on the one for cancer treatments. It gives a good idea of how DeepDyve works:
At the top you can see this search involved no mere hunt for the words “cancer treatments.” No, DeepDyve started me with “Turning off a protein that helps grow blood vessels that feed tumors actually makes cancers get bigger, not smaller, according to two new studies.” There’s more, but that captured my attention right there (good target marketing, DeepDyve!), since I’d read in New Scientist about a study that hinted at the opposite: starve a tumor of its blood supply, and it shrinks.
That pane on the left is for the subject areas covered by the search. DeepDyve says it contains 500 million web pages in its index covering a variety of topics; more on that in a bit. As you can see, all of the subject areas are checked, and my search returned a little over 410,000 results. DeepDyve returned the top 250, and by default shows them to me ten at a time (I could change that to 25 or 50 at a time, if I wished). You can minimize the pane if you find it distracting.
The blurbs under each entry typically span an entire paragraph, which is longer than the sentence or two you get from most search engines. It’s not unusual to need to read this much of a research paper before you know whether or not it will be useful to read the rest. DeepDyve makes the source of each item crystal clear, both from the icons on the left side of each entry and from displaying the author’s name, name of publication, and country (whatever information is available, presumably) under the link.
If you’d rather not see something so verbose, you can switch to a summary view. You’ll get a title, a sentence, the date the item was last updated, and the source. Likewise, instead of sorting the list of results by relevance, you can tell DeepDyve to sort by date or source.
Next: Continuing Research >>
More Search Engine News Articles
More By Terri Wells
