Revising the search query in the world of search is old news. When a user is looking for search results, there is little patience with vague results. And Google’s millions of results are are confusing to searchers and often wear them down by leading to continued searching.

The Hindu brought this topic to our attention in their article, “Of Google and scholarly search.” Applying a filtering mechanism that is not generally available with your average search engine can help you find relevant data. One option is Google Scholar, which helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research. Google also had another service – Knol – that is on its way out. Google is migrating Knol users to Annotum, though neither product is actually a search engine.

There are other tools, free and subscription-based, that can help users either get a more meaningful search or give access to research articles.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.