Chemse: Not Chem Abs but Useful and Free
January 12, 2010
Most of the pundits ignore the real world search problems. Ternary phase diagrams, math recipes, and chemical information to name three. But what you don’t know makes it easy to point out that content management is a great business and search is really simple. Dorkiness from pundits aside, the real world tackles information retrieval in subject areas the search poobahs rarely trek. For those interested in chemicals, chemical suppliers, and chemical industry news, check out Chemse, a free chemical search engine. About Us reported:
Our vision is the creation of a 100% transparence over the chemical market. Therefore we want to be an established partner for your daily business activities. We achieve this with sharing our experience, strong network, willingness for continuous improvement, a good team and with a steady improvement of our existing and new information.
A search for calcium permanganate returned vendors and this surprise:
Yes, a chemical structure. That’s a trick that the Google has not yet added to their online service.
The service operates a useful service. I can locate a seller of the chemical, scan news, and register. That’s free and delivers some additional services:
- Search history
- Predefine one’s inquiry text
- Keep an inquiry history
- See mail addresses for certain entities
- Manage inquires sent to a vendor.
More details as I locate them.
Stephen E Arnold, January 12, 2010
A freebie. I think I will report this sad fact to the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Comments
4 Responses to “Chemse: Not Chem Abs but Useful and Free”
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As a chemist, metallurgist and an information scientist I totally agree with your comment about some of special challeges of sciences that use graphical presentation. http://www.chemse.com is, according to the web site, not a chemical search application but a ‘chemcial ‘(sic) application. Nice to see such close attention to product quality.
The challenges of chemical structure searching are also being addressed by http://www.chemspider.com, an open source application acquired last year by the Royal Society of Chemistry (disclosure – I serve on two of the RSC committees). Work on enhancing the functionality and scope of Chemspider is now taking place.
Searching chemistry is not just a structure management problem. Take something like ?-lactams. On Google the use of the Greek character results in 340,000 hits, b-lactams comes back with 136,000 and beta-lactams generates 470,000 hits. It is surprising that Google has not taken more trouble to generate “do you mean” messages as these are immensely important antibiotics first synthesized in 1907.
As far as I can tell, Chemse is not supporting chemical structure search, in the sense of allowing a structure as a search query input. ChemSpider does.
As a chemist (an inorganic chemist), I would find chemical structure output from a search more useful, if it were correct. Structures of inorganic compounds rerturned by a search such as Chemse’s are more likely to be incorrect than are structures of organic compounds. Chemse’s output for calcium permanganate is incorrect. It has only one permanganate ion (single negative chanrge) per calcium ion (double positive charge). The result is a violation of the requirement that matter be overall electrically neutral.
Support of inorganic structure input for search is significantly more difficult than supporting organic structure input, because the rules for what is “allowed” are more subtle, more varied, and more frequently violated by actual structures of isolated and characterized compounds, and because the conventions by which all that variety can be represented are similarly less standardized.
In sum, my impression of Chemse is that they are trying to provide a much-needed service. They have some issues to address.
I am the Host of ChemSpider so am always interested to see new search offerings for Chemistry come online. Mostly because we are more than open to integration to help the community access information. I agree with Deborah that inorganics (and organometallics) are tougher than organics to represent in the appropriate manner. The ChemSe Calcium Permanganate is incorrect in terms of charge balance. As a result the formula, mass and InCHI are all incorrect. The single vendor associated is MP Biomedicals.
A search on ChemSpider gives this record: http://www.chemspider.com/Chemical-Structure.23333.html and includes that same vendor, a series of identifiers (EINECS number, CAS number, systematic names in multiple languages), access to patents and publications on PubMed as well as a series of properties.
Such services are very necessary on the web. I acknowledge the efforts of Chemse to use crowdsourcing approaches to cleaning up their data. It is a necessary part of hosting such a database.
I am the owner of Chemse. First thanks for the great Article. The search on http://www.chemse.com is only text based I checked the structure and yes it is incorrect. I found this link on the site of Chemspider http://www.chemspider.com/Chemical-Structure.20474234.html. Which maybe was corrected by a helpful user. So think i have partially the same source for structures. The site i created in my freetime, not as professional and the idea for it came up during my work as a sourcing specialist for SAFC. During this time there where only a few databases free available on the internet. Another interesting site with structur search is http://www.emolecules.com/. During my sourcing time mostly what i missed where manufacturers to the molecule match. Not only catalog suppliers. The site will never be as powerful as Chemspider, Emolecules or pubchem but hopefully will make some guys the life easier and its fun for me to work on it.