IrC - 21-8-2008 at 21:58
Correct me if I am wrong, but I remember reading the internet was invented at MIT so scientists could exchange information?
If so, what the hell happened to it? I remember clearly back in the mid to late 90's finding hits on scientific subjects was easy. Forget Fravia, so
far he has been of little help for me, just exactly how do we search for hidden science?
By this I mean are there any searching tricks I don't know about, or web-bot programs tailored for non pay science (and non porn) we can install on
our computers? I notice if I search google for example, and get half a million hits on a subject the first thousand are paid listings (they pay
someone somewhere to show up first). Problem is google only serves up the first thousand hits no matter how many links they actually know about!
So how do I find science anymore when they only show the places where for money I can get a PDF of a cool paper (or porn), anything other than say a
university site where I can go crazy for days reading about new things. I spend most of my time going through thousands of crap hits of little value
unless of course my primary mission is to spend as much money as I can for the least possible amount of useful information! If we assume over a
billion websites exist what good are they if all we are allowed access to are only the first thousand and of course they are all about the money.
Hopefully misc is where this question belongs, since finding mad science information is very important for us all. Possibly some think this question
would be better placed somewhere else, but if our time is valuable at all I believe this really is an important topic for all mad scientists.
Example: search terms: transistor avalanche circuit
Partial URL's of a few of the first 20 hits: (pay sites)
www.wipo.int/pctdb/
ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/
www.wipo.org/pctdb
stinet.dtic.mil/oai/oai?
www.iop.org/EJ/article
linkinghub.elsevier.com/
doi.wiley.com/10.1002
eprints.ecs.soton
The point being I could use a million different science related search terms and if we assume there are web sites other than pay sites talking about
the same thing then why statistically are the pay sites coming up first at greater than 50 percent odds? If the pay sites get into the thousands range
and google never serves up more than the first thousand hits then the odds of us ever finding pure unfettered science written by people like us is
near zero. Meaning google and every single search engine I have found has been poisoned by the money thing so the true internet has already died.
So back to my point in starting this thread. How can we find us?
[Edited on 8-22-2008 by IrC]
12AX7 - 22-8-2008 at 03:31
You can create (if someone else hasn't already) a customized Google search which excludes things.
This one is a little better, but was created with slightly different "anti-spam" goals.
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=010244073138481669636%3Avw...
I would guess the pay sites come up first because they have a high pagerank. This may be legitimate (a lot of pages linking to them) or fabricated
(shill webpages containing thousands of links to other shill pages and the targets of interest).
If you're actually looking for transistor avalanche circuits, try Linear Technology. Their application notes are exteremely informative and easy to
access off their website. Most manufacturers have free app notes, often searchable on a number of data searches, e.g. http://www.datasheetarchive.com.
Tim
IrC - 22-8-2008 at 07:11
Thanks, good ideas. No, I was just using that search as an example, something I have searched for in the past. I guess what I was mostly looking for
was two things, getting rid of paysites and finding those 900 million hits on the other side of the first thousand google serves up.
Polverone - 22-8-2008 at 08:59
If you use Google Scholar you will still see a lot of subscriber-only articles at the top of the listings. But if you click on the "All N versions"
link beneath the main article link, it will show you other places (often free) that the same content appears. For example, if the top hit is a for-pay
patent website, the other versions will show the same patent on free patent hosting websites. Or if it's a scholarly article, the same article may
appear on the author's homepage as well as in the paid journal, and you'll find it among the additional versions.
gregxy - 22-8-2008 at 09:16
If you are looking for medical information, or information related to drugs, biochemistry etc. the best place to start is pubmed.
Even worse than commercial sites is the fact that anyone can create a profesional looking web site. So just the fact that the site looks official
means nothing.