Elsevier Science is throwing down the gauntlet to Google users, challenging them to switch to its Scirus search engine (www.scirus.com) when scouring the web for scientific information. Though the publisher has come under fire for its pricing, Scirus has been available free since its 2001 launch. Amanda Spiteri, marketing director of Elsevier's ScienceDirect, told LJ that Scirus now has attracted more than one million users worldwide, a number "beyond expectations."

Spiteri echoed many academic librarians' frustrations, decrying the use of Google by graduate-level students and even professionals to perform serious research. She claims that while Google has numerous adequate functions, it isn't designed for scientific inquiry. "It's great if you want to order a pizza, but not for performing research," she joked.

In addition to searching more than 167 million science-specific web pages, Scirus covers 18 million full-text articles and abstracts from journal sources that include Medline, ScienceDirect, BioMed Central,and preprint archives. Elsevier says that Scirus "includes more coverage of proprietary and Open Access Initiative sources than any other free search engine."

Among Spiteri's reasons for claiming Scirus's superiority over Google is that its bibliometric identifiers used in searching recognize keywords in a matching site and rank the site according to terms and links. When valuing a term, Scirus measures the location and frequency of the term within a document, checking specifically if the term appears in the title, how many times it's used, and its location in the text. Elsevier determined that "when the terms in a query occur near to each other within a document it is more likely that the document is relevant to the query than if the terms occur at a greater distance."

Scirus searches for related web pages as well as for full-text articles and abstracts. The developers of Scirus worked with the University of Munich to create a dictionary of scientific terms that "occur uniformly across all subject areas." Scirus applies those terms to determine which pages provide the proper scientific data. But the search engine doesn't just search pure science sites and publications, it also looks for search terms in social science, business, and legal sources that provide related information.

A core motive behind the Internet's original creation was to share scientific information worldwide. Spiteri asserts that the net has become so overblown with commercial enterprises and personal homepages that the science aspect has been overshadowed. Scirus is "bringing back the power of the Internet for scientists," she said. "If you want to be a specialist, you need specialist tools."

She admits there is some suspicion about Elsevier's motives but assures LJ that Scirus isn't a promotion tool for the publisher's products. Spiteri emphasized that Scirus features materials from a wide variety of sources and that results are branded so users can see where the information originated. Elsevier expects to "benefit from the research output" generated by users to recoup its investment.

Elsevier will be conducting an aggressive marketing campaign, including education programs in libraries. Spiteri believes the best proof of Scirus's scientific search mastery over Google and others is for users simply to run identical searches on both "and let them see for themselves."