Sciencenet

"Sciencenet" is a experimental search engine at KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology - Liebel-Lab) for scientific knowledge. The Sciencenet software (YaCy) is based on p2p technology developed by Michael Christen in collaboration with Liebel-lab at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Background

Scientific knowledge is spread across many database, research institutes, educational websites and literature repositories. Todays search engines success is often based on popularity ranking. Popularity ranking is a powerful method for general search strategies, but less efficient for scientific knowledge. The Sciencenet search engine is especially for scientific websites and scientific content. It´s index consists educational (e.g. of ".edu" / ".ac.uk" /".ac.au") and major research facilities sites (e.g. Helmholtz, Max Planck etc). Only few ".com" websites are indexed. This is the major difference to the global YaCy search engine, which serves as a global search engine.

Sciencenet architecture

Sciencenet is a network of PCs running "YaCy", a distributed search engine software. The "Sciencenet core" is currently a mini cluster of low-cost PCs (64-bit, 2 GByte Ram, Ubuntu Linux, java and Sciencenet-Yacy software). Sciencenet-YaCy software has been designed and tested to run in a network with at least 2000 CPUs, with up to 10 Mio webpages per single CPU, allowing to search large and/or distributed information repositories.

Mission

Any university / research institute is encouraged to use the software and contribute to the scientific network. The software automatically connects to the "core cluster" and contributes its search engine to the sciencenet network. A high speed internet broadband connection (> 2 Mbit/s) and dedicated PCs are required. Ideally every research institute runs the free YaCy-Sciencenet software on 1-2 local PCs and provides its contents to the network. As a side effect. Extra wasted bandwidth from external search engines is reduced to a minimum with YaCy technology. The sciencenet ideally provides a free, open scientific search engine index to the community.

Current status

• Currently some 100.000.000 words are in the index spread across a low cost PCs cluster.
• See the current [http://141.52.175.10:8080/Network.html? Sciencenet network] overview.
• See the participating peers with detailed index information.

See also

• YaCy, a distributed free p2p search engine

External links

• Sciencenet search portal
• Full sciencenet article at liebel-lab KIT website (plus software download)
• Liebel-Lab @ KIT
• yacy.net