PubMed getting a makeover : search engines consulted

Thanks to Dean GiustiniUBC Google scholar blogger. January 30 2006 "The National Library of Medicine is retooling its PubMed search engine....according to an article in today's Bio-IT World PubMed getting a makeover. David Lipman, Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), says that he has consulted search engines MSN Search, A9 Search and Google" Dean sees three main search issues for possible improvements to become more user-friendly:

1. address users' demands for easier navigability (represented by Google and Google scholar
2. provide better interoperability within citations to NCBI genome data (which Google cannot do)
3. link to full-text outside of the NIH to items in open access repositories and in the deep web.

The article mentiones that "The goal is to make it easier for users to uncover information related to their query, which may remain harder to spot with the current system." according to David Lipman.

If you take into consideration that three large search engines are consulted, you can assume that development will go into the direction of :

• making related and linked information from the Internet more visible
• maybe offer extended limit-options based on web-content, perhaps divided into several categories of information.
• They also might look at Scopus for their interface of refining/limiting the results with the visible indexes via direct "citation analysis". Many people seem to like this, making the evalution of the search and the result sets more easy.

We can expect to see changes somewhere this year!