by digitalART (artct45)
A search engine for open notebook science:
[Via Michael Nielsen]
There has been some great discussion in the comments on my post about “Open science”. One outcome is that Jean-Claude Bradley has created a search engine customized for open notebook science:
Fittingly, many people contributed to the discussion!
This demonstrates one of the nice abilities of Web 2.0 approaches. Google permits you to set up a custom search for a group of websites. This allows you to perform a directed search using specific terms against a designated group of websites.
This example examines a group of Open Science sites but it is easy to see how this might be useful for other sites. This way you do not have to work your way through a multitudeof irrelevant sites.
RSS is really good for bringing me content but what if I want to find an article from one of my newsfeeds from a few months ago? With this, I can simply add all the websites I track to the custom search. Then I am searching a much smaller but very directed subset of the web and am much likelier to find the old article I read.
A user-generated subset of Google web searches may be very useful for linking the content of several sites. This could be fun to play with. I’ll have to put one together for Science 2.0.