Google Co-op for UsefulChem

You will notice a new search box on top of this blog. I finally got around to creating a Google co-op search site for all the websites related to UsefulChem. This includes all these:

• http://drexel-coas-elearning.wikispaces.com
• http://drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com
• http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com
• http://usefulchem.blogspot.com
• http://usefulchem-experiments1.blogspot.com
• http://usefulchem-molecules.blogspot.com
• http://showme.physics.drexel.edu/usefulchem

A lot of people have started doing (e.g. Sciencebase) this and I can see why. It works eerily well.

For example, searching for butylamine pulls up the correct UsefulChem page for t-butylamine. But the term "butylamine" does not appear anywhere on the page. Looking at the cache version in the results reveals that the term appears in a page pointing to this one. This thing is really smart!

There is really not much need anymore for using tables of content to navigate the knowledge space since this is so much faster. This is similar to how the speed and power of Gmail's search engine removes the need to file and sort emails.

Yet another reason why Google free services are likely to be a key component of the open scientific data revolution.