Yahoo Better than Pubmed?
What is the best search engine for finding research papers?
I am pretty sure there are elaborate methods of comparing search engines. I decided to go with the ‘can you find the paper I am thinking of…method.’ The paper entitled, “Data-collection strategies” by Zbigniew Dauter is a classic. I would highly recommend it to anyone who sees themselves being involved in any sort of crystallographic data collection.
The comparison will involve 3 separate searches (from easy to hard), followed by counting from the 1st result until the paper is shown. The 3 search terms used are as follows:
(1) data collection strategies dauter
(2) data collection strategies crystallography
(3) data collection crystallography
The results are numbered with 1st result being given 1, second 2, etc…
| Search Engine | (1) | (2) | (3) |
| Google Scholar | 1 | 1 | 25 |
| Bing | 1 | 1 | 50+ |
| Yahoo | 1 | 2 | 50+ |
| Excite | 3 | 9 | 50+ |
| Hubmed | 1 | 17 | 50+ |
| Pubmed | 1 | 17 | 50+ |
| Ask | 1 | 19 | 50+ |
| ISI Web of Knowledge | 1 | 29 | 50+ | Pubget | 1 | 50+ | 50+ |
Notes: Hubmed sorts by publication date and since the paper was published in 1999 resulted in a quite low ranking. ISI Web of Knowledge for the (1) attempt the entry had to be split apart with Dauter being placed as an author input (or not results appeared). Also with Web of Knowledge, I had to changed default from date to sort by relevance.
Google Scholar was the best search engine in this case. I still a big fan of Hubmed for its web-related terms functions despite its poor performance in this test. I included a number of search engines that I never use for finding publications such as Yahoo. The interesting part is that Yahoo ended up returning a better result than Pubmed!
What search engine(s) are you using?