

Ask HN: Review my startup - Odysci.com - raberga

http://www.odysci.com<p>Odysci is a new and free academic search site. If you used Google Scholar, MS Academic Search or CiteSeer in the past, check out Odysci.<p>We currently cover papers in the computer science, electronics and math areas, and we plan to expand to other scientific domains later.
While our coverage is still not as broad as Google Scholar’s, we cover the main journals and conferences in CS/EE and we’re continuously adding new papers. We pride ourselves in the quality of our search and relevance of the results (i.e., ranking), for which we have developed our own algorithms.<p>Besides search, the portal also has information about conference deadlines, lists of best papers and comments by experts in different fields. We also keep a blog (http://blog.odysci.com) where we post new features and discuss stuff that matters to researchers, and a Twitter account (@odysci) with posts on interesting technical news and links to related searches.<p>Would love to get your feedback on the portal, its usability, quality of ranking, and any other suggestion you may have.
Thanks!<p>Odysci Team
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bradhe
I think you could be competitive with the other search providers if you
focused on a specific topic (i.e. comp scie only). You might be able to
eventually provider different portals for each field, too.

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raberga
Thanks. Currently we do focus on computer science, electrical engineering and
math areas. There is a lot of overlap between these fields, so it makes sense
to group them. As for other domains, we do plan to add them later, and as you
point out, having portals or a good way to separate them is a good idea.

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jayzee
looks good but I am not sure why I would use this more than I would use say
Google Scholar?

Also could you explain with an example perhaps how your search results would
trump Google Scholar? Such an example of on the home page would help people
understand the value proposition.

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raberga
Thanks for your comment. Let me try to give you a few examples of things we do
better than Scholar:

a) Navigation over the results When you search in Scholar you get a list of
papers but you cannot navigate through the details of a paper, for example,
click on an author to see his/her papers. On the other hand, using Odysci, the
search results have all the data linked and right there, so you can click on
authors, click on the conference, click on the conference series (to see
papers for a all years of a given conference). Along the same lines, we can
filter and sort the search results by relevance, date, citations, and
publication type (e.g, journal, conference). Scholar does not do that.

b) Advanced Search We have some interesting new ways to search using our
operator '@'. For example, you can search for papers by a given author while
he/she worked at a given place. Say, you want to search for papers published
by Leslie Lamport while working at SRI: you would use as search string
'lamport@SRI'. Or search for papers published at the DAC Conference (Design
Automation Conference) when it was held in San Francisco, you would search for
'venue:DAC venue@"San Francisco"'. In Scholar, the advanced search facilities
are less powerful.

c) Best Papers We collected the information related to Best Paper Awards at
hundreds of conferences and we make that available through advanced search.
For example, to find all the Best Papers published at DAC conferences, you
would search for 'venue:DAC bp:true'. This is something unique to Odysci.

d) BibTex Generation In Scholar you can generate Bibtex, one paper at a time.
This can get very boring if you need to collect multiple references. In
Odysci, you can select multiple papers, even through multiple searches, and
generate BibTex for all of them in one shot.

e) Handling of accents in non-English words Try searching for an author name
with accents in Scholar. You'll see that their handling of accents during
search is limited. In Odysci we handle accents seamlessly.

There are other things which we think we have an edge over Scholar but I'll
stop here. Your comments are welcome.

Thanks (and I'll follow your advice and add some of these advantages to our
home page).

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jayzee
Thanks for the detailed response. I will keep checking you guys out and best
of luck!

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az
linkity: <http://www.odysci.com>

