Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2005 15:29:53 +0530 (IST)
From: Subbiah Arunachalam
Friends:
Spread the word among chemists. It is a boon to chemists.
Arun
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More on Chmoogle
David Bradley, Oogling for Chemists, Reactive Reports, Issue #50. Excerpt:
San Diego based eMolecules Inc has launched what one might consider to
be the chemical equivalent of the Google search engine - "Chmoogle".
The company describes Chmoogle as the world's leading free open-access
chemistry search engine and its mission is to discover, curate, and
index all of the public chemical information in the world, and make it
available to the public. "The world's knowledge in chemistry is an
invaluable resource", said Klaus Gubernator, eMolecule's Chief
Executive Officer. "It lies dormant until it becomes searchable by
every chemist. The language of chemistry is chemical structures.
Chmoogle makes the world's chemistry searchable by structure. Just
draw a molecule using your favorite structure drawing tool and hit
Go!" "Currently, there are any number of excellent text search
engines," Craig James, Chmoogle's Chief Technology Officer told us.
"If you want to know everything about 'Alexander Fleming' (inventor of
penicillin), they can help you," he adds. However, if you draw the
penicillin molecule with your favorite chemical editor, can you search
for it, James asks, "With Chmoogle you can." Before Chmoogle, there
was no free Internet resource of this nature. It provides a genuine
cheminformatics system that anyone could use to find information using
a substructure search. A number of academic institutions have
searchable databases, but they're usually focused on their particular
field of science, and their search systems are often primarily for
organizing only their data. Chmoogle's goal is to be the search system
to index all of the world's publicly available chemical
information....Chmoogle goes deeper than a superficial search of the
latent chemical Web, as one would hope. It allows users to send
queries, results and individual structures as links to their
colleagues using email. This, the company says, will create an
unparalleled collaborative environment for chemists worldwide.
Chmoogle also provides "Chmoogle Free" code that users can embed into
their own Web sites for direct access to Chmoogle, as well as hosted
cheminformatics systems and full Web sites for chemical suppliers,
pharmaceutical and other chemical industries. James does not see a
conflict between Chmoogle and efforts to use the InChI. "Since
Chmoogle will be crawling the Web looking for information, it may
provide a valuable adjunct to their service: High-performance
searches, combined with cross references to other places that Chmoogle
has found the same molecule (for example, commercial vendors who have
the molecule for sale, or other academic sites such as Zinc or
PubChem)."
