WorldWideScience.org: The Global Science Gateway
From the webpage:
WorldWideScience.org is a global science gateway—accelerating scientific discovery and progress through a multilateral partnership to enable federated searching of national and international scientific databases and portals.
You have to pick “Advanced Search” to get an idea of the range of coverage offered by this gateway.
Note that the service offers multilingual searching powered by Microsoft Translator.
I did a search for “partially observable Markov processes” (thinking to avoid a real flood of “hits”) and was quickly shown six (6) “hits.” Then a popup appeared advising that a full search was complete, asking if it should add another four hundred-forty seven (447) results. The criteria for the “quick” results isn’t clear but it is impressive. Now the interface advises: 453 results from at least 3266 found.
Odd to see SpringerLink listed first under the Author facet on the left-hand side of the screen.
The search “hits” re-ordered themselves and since I had used an exact match string, the first item was Technical rept. no. 4 from MIT, Corporate Author: MASSACHUSETTS INST OF TECH CAMBRIDGE OPERATIONS RESEARCH CENTER, Personal Author: Kramer,J. David R. ,Jr., Report Date: April 1964.
You get “alerts” of later results but only if you have a registered account. But you have to search before you see a link to the login page, where you can create an account. For your convenience, the login page.
It is a very interesting “federation” of search results but I am troubled by not knowing the limitations of the underlying search engines.