WorldWideScience opened for business in June 2007 with an ambitious goal - to give “citizens, researchers, and anyone else interested in science the capability to search science portals not easily accessible through popular search technology.” The site was developed by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) at the U.S. Department of Energy in partnership with the British Library and eight other countries. WorldWideScience.org uses a technology called “federated search” to comb through 24 large international science databases, including the national science gateways of 19 nations.

So far, all WorldWideScience results are delivered in English. Researchers are attempting to build a service that translates an English-language query to another language, then translates the results back into English, “but it isn’t simple and I don’t know if or when it will be available,” says Dr. Walter Warnick, director of OSTI. A more attainable goal, he says, is providing authentication to national science portals that require users to register. Jumping that hurdle will make several more databases available, he says.

Many science research results are archived in sources that are not reachable through common search engines like Google and Yahoo! This hidden content, which is sometimes referred to as the “Deep Web,” is estimated to be many times larger than the sea of information most people surf upon. Federated search engines transmit a single query to multiple search engines after translating them into the appropriate syntax, then report the results back to the user on a single page. WorldWideScience follows the model of Science.gov, the U.S. interagency science portal that relies on content published by each participating U.S. agency. Warnick estimates that the volume of scientific information made accessible through the new portal equals the volume that’s searchable by Google.

“We are the only federated search that will send your query to servers in every inhabited continent in the world, in real time, and get the results back to you in seconds,” he says. “We feel that we’ve taken federated searching to a new level.”