A message from Dr. Michael R. Alvers at  GoPubMed.

This semantic search engine reduces search time by up to 90%. By sorting search results, it enables scientists to answer biomedical questions in completely new way.
 
The latest version of the search engine sorts all relevant documents to the top level categories What, Who, Where and When. This way, it is possible to design searches on both content and metadata in a seamlessly integrated way. Dr. Michael R. Alvers, CEO, points out that the opportunity for a user to rank the search results according to personal needs is revolutionary. “We don’t rank, the user does!” says Alvers. “With our semantic technology we put the user at the center of the search. Ranking algorithms like Google’s PageRank are not relevant for us anymore since with our search technology the user is in the driver’s seat. Also the folksonomy feature to curate matches is new and makes the Web 2.0 here and now!” continues Alvers enthusiastic.

Traditional search engines are successful in helping users find information based on keywords, but they are not successful in answering complex questions. Knowledge searches are needed to answer the complex questions which are so predominant in the life sciences. Knowledge, however, is hardly ever used in traditional search engines. The new version of the search engine GoPubMed is based on two knowledge networks containing more than 120,000 terms: Gene Ontology (GO) and the Medical subject headings (MeSH). This allows biologists and medical doctors to find the needle in the haystack in both the bio-molecular and the medical domains.

A message from Jay Bhatti at Spock. 

This is hot off the press. We just implemented a few really cool features! See below for details. This came directly from the feedback you gave us on wanting messaging and the ability to share contact information with other users….


1. Messaging – We implemented simple messaging on Spock. So, once you find who you are looking for, if they are a valid Spock user, you can send a message to them. The big difference here is that the message will go directly to their email address and not to some “inbox” in Spock. All messages sent via Spock go directly to your email account.  Eventually in the future, that message could go directly to your preferred Social Network, or even to your cell phone as a text message. This feature is being implemented since users said that once they found the right person on Spock, they had no way of contacting them or sending them a simple message.

2. Trust Network – Users have demanded that we overhaul the “favorites” in Spock and make it more useful. Now, you can add people to your trust network and share contact information with them. So, if I wanted my 1,500 contacts to always be able to reach me via email or know my latest cell number or IM address, they can just look in Spock. I can decide who I share this information with in my settings. Again, this was driven by user request as they said that while we organize their public presence on Spock, why not allow them to organize all of their fragmented communication tools in Spock as well. So, regardless if you use gmail, Meebo, Yahoo, Facebook, etc, we will allow you to organize it all in Spock and share that with the people you trust. Again, this is in line with our goal of organizing information around people and taking fragmented information and making it organized. We are not building out any of these communication tools, we are just allowing you to organize and share them easily. We will even make it possible for people you trust to know if you are online on any of your IM clients at any time!  If you have a lot of favorites you may be wondering what happened to them – don’t worry. If you click in “Trusted” and look at the right side, you will see a link called “people you might want to add” – this is your favorites list from before.. . It serves as an easy way for you to see them and invite them to Trust you on Spock so that you can contact them and also share contact information with them.