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Oh Really! 5 Questions With...
[Ammy Vogtlander]
Sep 2004In each issue, this section presents an interview with someone in the field of content management. In this issue we interview Ammy Vogtlander from Elsevier to learn more about Scirus, Elsevier's science-focused science engine.
| Name: | Ammy Vogtlander |
| Company: | Elsevier |
| Title: | General Manager, Scirus |
| Brief Bio: | Ammy Vogtlander joined Scirus in 2002. She is responsible for managing the team's day-to-day activities as well as developing new concepts and market strategies. Prior to joining Scirus, Ammy worked as Senior Technology Manager for ScienceDirect. Her work focused on the design and implementation of a new usage reporting system providing Elsevier customers with insight into the behavior of their users. Previous to working at Elsevier, she held management positions at Boer & Croon Strategy Consulting and AMS, an American IT consultancy. Vogtlander holds a Masters Degree in Physics from Groningen University in the Netherlands and conducted her final research in the field of Pattern Recognition. |
[1]What is Scirus and how does it work?
Ammy: Scirus is the most comprehensive science-focused search engine available on the Internet. Scirus offers free and easy searching for relevant and trustworthy scientific information on the Web. Driven by the latest search engine technology and searching over 167 million science-specific Web pages, Scirus gives users the ability to pinpoint scientific, technical, scholarly and medical information on the Internet. It finds the latest reports, peer-reviewed articles and journals that other search engines miss. Web sources covered by Scirus include pages from universities, governments, scientific organizations and conferences, scientists' homepages and company pages worldwide. Scirus includes more coverage of proprietary and Open Access Initiative (OAI) sources than any other free search engine available on the Internet. Scirus is powered by search technology provided by Fast Search & Transfer ASA (FAST). Elsevier has partnered with FAST to create unique processes that ensure that Scirus is the best tool for finding scientific information on the Web.
[2] How does Scirus rank its search results?
Ammy: Scirus leverages Elsevier's knowledge and experience within the scientific community. Its immense data sets, including proprietary and other scientific information, enable Scirus to offer unique and relevant search results. Using specifically designed scientific dictionaries, linguistic analysis and a unique algorithm, Scirus categorizes and improves the relevance and ranking of search results. Scirus is able to mix, rank and indicate the importance of different sources fairly and accurately, as it is not driven by advertising revenue. It balances between Web and proprietary sources and between structured and unstructured data. It also identifies validated sources by branding listed results, making it simple for users to gather valuable, accredited sources.
[3] Who are the typical end-users, and why do they come to Scirus to find information rather than one of the popular general search engines?
Ammy: Scirus has an established and satisfied customer base, with more than a million users coming back month after month. Target end-users are individuals looking for accurate and reliable scientific and academic information, particularly researchers, scientists and students. while general search engines have become extremely popular, serious searchers and those looking for specific, targeted information are turning to specialized search engines, like Scirus. Scirus provides end-users with the relevant results they need, while filtering out less important information. Scirus recognized the need for specialized search engine technology far sooner than its competitors and has set itself apart with the quality of its content and depth of its searches. Scirus is the only search engine that focuses on scientific content on the Web and has access to the world's largest database of scientific, technical and medical journals. It returns results from the entire Web, including access-controlled sites and proprietary information, not indexed by other search engines. Scirus also leverages Elsevier's unparalleled publishing knowledge and resources. Search engine marketing and paid inclusion have become popular tactics for companies to use to ensure high ranking on general search engines. This makes it difficult for users to distinguish good information from bad information. Scirus is helping users by ensuring validated sources are clearly branded and focusing on scientific information and scientific, academic and valuable Websites.
[4] What are the advantages for publishers to make content available through Scirus and how can they participate?
Ammy: Scirus enables publishers and other organizations owning valuable scientific content to reach out to their target audiences; scientists, researchers and students. In cooperation with the publishers, Scirus has established the best method for indexing content, ensuring high coverage and capturing important fields such as author, publishing date, journal title and other bibliographic information. Scirus covers free Web and proprietary sources and clearly brands results from journals and valuable institutional sources. Not only does this help users distinguish validated results from more general scientific Web results, but it also increases the brand awareness of the publishing organization.
[5] How is the information retrieval market changing, and what additional functionality is currently in the works at Scirus?
Ammy: With the proliferation of more and more information on the Web, it is critical that researchers and other end-users needing accurate and reliable information have a tool that eliminates irrelevant content. We are witnessing a trend of companies devoting additional resources toward providing their content on the Web, and some are raising their rankings on general search engines through search engine marketing. Scirus recognizes the challenges faced by researchers and others seeking trustworthy scientific and academic content online, and has developed a specialized algorithm to optimize its search indexing methods and ranking. Scirus is dedicated to the most up-to-date, relevant and comprehensive scientific and academic search results on the Web. Scirus will continue to invest in developing and implementing the most cutting edge technology geared toward scientific searching.
