NIF Web Index

NIF has created a customized Web index for neuroscience.  NIF Web is based on an index of the World Wide Web, just like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.  However, we create the Web index from the core set of neuroscience-relevant resources listed in the NIF Registry.  We crawl these sites and the sites to which they are linked.

While not as broad as Google, NIF Web provides a more focused view that can be very useful for finding neuroscience information or resources. NIF Web search results are particularly gainful when searching for terms that have multiple meanings. Imagine typing the query "knock out" into the commercial search engines.  Results for transgenic animals will be dwarfed by boxing Web pages.  In NIF's targeted list of Web pages, the results that are most prominent are knock-out mice, genes, etc.

The NIF Web index isn’t manually curated, so some extraneous sites slip through, but on the whole, the set of search results includes many scientific, government, and university sites with useful information. With the release of NIF 2.0, we've added several features that should make the Web results more useful:

• A feedback box for each Web result returned, so that NIF users can help tune NIF Web by flagging inappropriate content;
• Ranking of web results not by the number of links or how often the content is updated, but by neuroscience relevance as determined by concepts in the NIF ontologies;
• New snippet-based interface.