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 ---- 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)."