The University of Manchester's national data centre Mimas is set to launch an Internet search engine rivalling Google at the end of January. The free service will add thousands of documents to the 'Intute' service which already allows academics, teachers, researchers and students to search for information relating specifically to their subject area.
The launch follows high profile criticism by a senior academic at Brighton University, who argued that students need to be taught to challenge the facts taken from Google or Wikipedia. At the end of January, researchers will be able to automatically access papers from research databases within universities and other institutions.
The £1.5 million per year collaboration between seven UK universities and partners enlists a team of full-time specialists who are scouring the Internet. They are backed by an army of PhD students and a range of organisations, including the Wellcome Trust, who have added their own information to the Intute database.
Intute also provides free Internet tutorials in a 'Virtual Training Suite' to help students learn how to get the best from the web. It is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee and The Arts and Humanities Research Council. Intute's new content will be harvested automatically using purposely designed software from trustworthy sources, primarily UK university research databases and repositories.
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