DeepDyve is a new search engine that is aimed at students, academics, and knowledge workers. DeepDyve's mission is to index the 'deep web' that is hidden behind pay walls and subscription fees. We first looked at DeepDyve in September, when it was still called Infovell and hidden behind a pay wall itself. Starting today, Infovell has not only changed its name, but is also available in a free version.
Since the launch of its first version in September, DeepDyve has slightly improved its user interface, but if you have used a subscription database before, DeepDyve's interface and feature set, with the ability to narrow your results by subject areas and save your searches, will look quite familiar.
DeepDyve also released a paid version of its service for $45 a year month, which will also allow you to refine your searches by content type. Other features of the paid version include dynamic clustering, visual clustering, and advanced search.
DeepDyve is slowly expanding into more search verticals, but for now, its focus is on life sciences, physical scienes, and patents, though it also indexes a few humanities journals. The service also indexes newspaper and lets you search for Wikipedia articles as well. Overall, DeepDyve's index consists of about 500 million pages.
DeepDyve launched with a good amount of hype this morning, but after our initial tests, we have come away somewhat disillusioned. Most users who need to search academic sources can already do so through databases like Academic Search Premier, Lexis-Nexis, PubMed, or Science Direct. These services also typically feature more advanced search functions and often give you direct access to the full text of your sources as well.
As useful as it can be to be able to search the deep web, most of the articles retrieved by DeepDyve still sit behind paywalls anyway, and you either need to have access to an institutional subscription to access these sources or pay a hefty fee per article.
DeepDyve markets itself as being the first search engine that allows its users to "access a wealth of untapped information that resides on the 'Deep Web'" - and if you forget about Google Scholar and the myriad of subscription databases, then that is surely true. In its current incarnation, however, DeepDyve is mostly an interesting technical experiment.
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It is really interesting to see that ten years after google has killed all his competitors three search engine has been launched this year : cuil, powerset and deepdyve.
The three of them had been launched Loudly ! And the three of the disappointed the expectancies.
Why ?
Because the nedd is high! But the need for what? The need for enjoying the incredible rich content generated by the deep web.
Why disapointing?
Because the search engine is not the good answer. The search engine leads you to a list, and a hierarchy whereas people want an access a personnalized access, a subjective internet.
Posted by: stetoscope | November 11, 2008 11:29 AM
The biggest problem with this site (at the moment) is the forced signup to use the search engine.
If a company is going to launch a search company - open your product to the world free, without sign up, so people can use it.
I dont have any arguments charging for additional features - but signing up to use a "free" search engine turned me away immediately.
Posted by: ReadWriteWebMan | November 11, 2008 2:47 PM
Well the biggest problem is their broken sign up. First they want my mailing address (yeah, right) and then it says the confirmation email has been sent which I haven't received in 24 hours.
So I tried to trigger it again by asking for my password to be reset and it said the email has been sent and 8 hours later still no word.
One horrible experience so far and I haven't even used the product. I can't wait.
Posted by: Pierre Far | November 12, 2008 7:31 AM
I agree with other commenters that requiring a sign-up for a free search engine is unusual, and will turn some away. But I reviewed Infovell favorably in October, and like what they're doing. A better way to search for evidence is long overdue -- many of us interested in evidence-based management believe we deserve better.
Posted by: Tracy Allison Altman | November 12, 2008 8:24 AM
Is it just me, or does anyone else see a real downside to phonetic spellings like DeepDyve (instead of DeepDive)?
If you mention it to a friend, will they really go home and spell it the right way (which is the wrong way)?
Posted by: Charles Knight | November 12, 2008 12:09 PM
Exactly my thoughts. If someone would "tell" me to go to this site without taking the time to spell it right for me, naturally I'd go to deepdive.com, the same way I went looking for cool.com when I wanted to test Cuil. The only search engine that has come up with a clever name is Find.com. If you're looking for something, you definitely want to find it, right? How clever is that!
Posted by: saharra | November 15, 2008 2:53 PM
As far as I know, the indexing algorithm (so called keyphrase) behind infovell's serach engine is flawed and is not superior to the term frequency based approaches employed by the traditional indexers.
Posted by: Mark Johnson | November 28, 2008 5:16 PM
It is interesting the fact that one version would be pre-paid and the results would be better, so now the results would be monopolized and not 100% free.
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