Scirus

» see scirus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i was inside a computer engineering department for the whole of scirus's useful life and i still cannot swear to you that i typed into it. That is not a knock on the product. In the mid 2000s a university library page handed you a row of search boxes with no explanation of which one was which, and you used whichever had been placed nearest the top. Scirus was somewhere in that row for years, on library pages all over the world, doing real work for people who never learned its name.

Elsevier built it and launched it in 2001, free, no account. It indexed science and only science, which in 2001 was a defensible strategy, because a general web search in that year would bury a paper under commercial noise inside three results. Scirus reached past the journals into patents and the pages researchers kept on their own department servers, the preprints and lecture notes and half-finished chapters that never got a DOI. At its size it claimed 167 million pages.

The business logic underneath was never hidden. Scirus was free and its results routed you into Scopus, Elsevier's paid abstract and citation database. The search engine was a doorway. Nobody minded much, because the doorway happened to be excellent and the alternative in 2001 was worse.

~ the record ~

~ what it was for ~

The problem Scirus solved has mostly been forgotten because it stopped being a problem. Before roughly 2005, finding a specific paper meant knowing in advance which database held it, and each database had its own login and its own syntax. A tool that crawled the open web with a science-shaped filter was a real shortcut.

It was also one of the few places that treated an institutional repository as a first-class source. A thesis sitting on a Dutch or Turkish university server was findable in Scirus years before general search took repositories seriously. For anyone outside a wealthy library's subscription list, which is most of the world, that mattered more than the journal coverage did.

~ the thing that beat it ~

Google Scholar launched in november 2004 and the argument was over within a few years. Scholar did not need to be better at any single thing. It only needed to be in the box people were already typing into, with a citation count attached to every result, and it was. Elsevier spent most of a decade watching a free product from a company with no stake in publishing take the audience it had built.

When the announcement came it was unusually direct for a corporate retirement notice. Elsevier said Scirus had lost its edge and that trying to catch up was not the right use of the money, so the attention would go to its core products instead. The site was set to retire by the end of january 2014. By february the homepage was already saying it was gone.

~ the inheritance ~

What went with it was the idea that a publisher should run the front door to its own field. Elsevier has since put its energy into Scopus and into the analytics business behind it, which is a more profitable place to stand and a less useful one to be a graduate student in front of.

scirus.com has no DNS record now, not even a parked page. The 167 million pages it indexed did not vanish with it, they just went back to being findable only by people who already know where to look.

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