Good search engine for science results on NGC

[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

Hello All,

You will probably be familiar with the problems with Google's search algorithm when you ask it to find "in depth" (science type) information about a particular NGC object.

Typically, you get:
- frequently referenced sites coming up ( most of which have trivial information)
- search results including NGC objects other than the one you have searched for
- observing lists & descriptions made by amateur astronomers
- lots of sites with only basic information

I have recently found a Russian search engine called Yandex:
http://www.yandex.com
that has very good capabilities when you ask it to search for information about a specific object.

I have only started to test this engine in detail, but when I put inverted commas around the object name, e.g "NGC 3115", this engine ONLY gets results about the object in question, and good results at that.

Another important thing Yandex lets you do is to click at the bottom of the page, which will sort the search results by "date", rather than by "relevance"
This is an excellent idea, because much of what a search engine thinks is relevant about an NGC object is usually fairly useless for getting very detailed information about an object. Clicking to get date order, for the results, weeds out a lot of the amateur observing notes, popular-level sites, and other distracters, and finds a lot of the more technical-level information. (the "date order search" finds a lot of science results)

Cheers,
Mad bad galaxy man

I wouldn't say "date order" is always superior to "order results by relevance", but it gives a different perspective from the results of other search engines.

Yandex is not exactly "better" than google, but it is one of the few search engines that gives a different but very valuable set of results.
Yandex isn't too clever for its own good (google's "intelligence" seems to give results that are mainly useful for "Joe Average"

[mjc (Mark)]

I had not heard of it until your posting.

I did a search (on google I have to say) and found this

http://www.businessweek.com/articles...cience-collide

So your comment "Good search engine for science results on NGC"
appears very true when left at "Good search engine for science results"
(okay - it'll be dedicated software in this case - but still sounds good).

I intend to give this a go - I did one search on emacs cvs commands and got some 388 results on yandex compared to Google's 1,030,000 results. Yandex does appear relevant. Both engines came up with the same top-of-the-list result.

Mark C.

[Astro_Bot]

Have you tried Google Scholar? It has limited source sites (as far as I can tell) but might be worth a go: http://scholar.google.com.au/

[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

Originally Posted by Astro_Bot

Have you tried Google Scholar? It has limited source sites (as far as I can tell) but might be worth a go: http://scholar.google.com.au/

I sometimes use:
http://scholar.google.com
for finding astronomical papers.

I also look up astronomy and astrophysics preprints at:
http://arxiv.org
This is excellent for finding out what is currently being published in a sub-field within astronomy

However, the best and most comprehensive and the most powerful resource for finding astronomical papers is:
http://adswww.harvard.edu
(at least, once you have learnt how to use the complex and rather confusing search forms)

I like the yandex "date order" search, as it gives me a good indication of what research is currently going on, in relation to a particular astronomical topic.

cheers, bad galaxy man