PharmaLive Search (http://www.pharmalivesearch.com/) is maintained by publisher PharmaLive and powered by Convera. It searches PharmaLive’s collection of publications, selected industry and therapeutic web sites, and relevant blogs. You can search Publisher Recommended Sites, PharmaLive.com, or the Web. Although the web search option is not limited to specially selected sites, they are ranked for relevance with respect to the subject and have been filtered for spam.
‘Publisher recommended sites’ covers over 25 000 000 documents from more than 2600 selected domains. ‘Search PharmaLive’ provides results from the PharmaLive itself and its print publications. Much of the information is free but articles from PharmaLive’s own publications are priced.
Variations in spellings, for example hypoglycaemia and hypoglycemia, are automatically included in your search as are synonyms. My search on mushroom poisoning picked up terms such as toxicity, and ‘adverse reactions’ picked up ‘adverse effects’. As one would expect from a vertical search engine, the synonym identification is vastly superior to Google’s efforts. If you make a complete mess of the spelling it automatically prompts you with a “did you mean..” option.
At the top of your results page there are links to broader, narrower and related terms, and to the left of the screen are displayed most popular searches and related concepts. You can focus your search further by using the category tabs. For example, if you have chosen to search publisher recommended sites there are tabs for All, Associations, Media, Government (as far as I could see this covers relevant bodies world-wide), Companies, R&D, and Blogs. When searching PharmaLive.com you are offered options for Med Ad News, R&D Directions, and Pharma Live News. Those articles that are only available on subscription are marked with a blue padlock.
If you regularly search for pharmaceutical and health care information , add this one to your list of tools and also consider downloading the PharmLive Search toolbar.