December 03, 2009
RefSeek Recommended
Search engine RefSeek announces new features press release, Altsearchengines (Dec 2, 2009)
RefSeek is a search engine expressly for students and researchers that launched in late 2008 This new version offers document search, definitions, natural language math calculations, and an expanded reference directory. It claims to return "relevant academic search results from around the Web while filtering out commercial content".
Results are of higher quality - or were on my queries on records and information management. Web results were from governments, universities, and organizations. Document collections include CiteSeerX collection and arXiv, some journals and newspapersm and other documents (mainly pdfs) pulled from the web. It's estimated that RefSeek indexes 1 billion documents.
Content is mainly US, with some from the UK and Australia. None from Canada. RefSeek doesn't provide information on the web or document sources it indexes.
There is some search syntax: quotes, - sign, OR, site: And for individual results there is a link to "search this site'. The search engine would benefit from an Advanced Search as well to assist searches in restricting to domain or title, and to work with date range.
The Directory is a rarity these days. This one has quality reference resources categorized into Almanacs, Atlases, Answers -- all the way to Writing. There is a category for Search Engines with a few entries. Those for meta-searchers are very poor. There are better metasearch engines than those three starting with Allplus.com, iSeek, and Carrot2.
Directories are rare because they are hard to maintain. RefSeek might wish to invite participation from its users.
On the whole this is a worthy tool for researchers looking for academic, professional, or government documents. But there are some shortcomings. It would be good to know who is sponsoring this endeavour. Researchers also need to know what they can expect to find - what are the indexing policies? Not having Canadian content reduces the value of this tool to Canadians. And we hope that the search facility will be extended.
Postscript Dec 9 - Refseek has added Canadian content - the .ca domain especially government domains is well represented.
Posted by Gwen at December 3, 2009 03:40 PM