The University of Manchester announced yesterday a reintroduction of the academic search engine Intute, slated for the end of the month.
The newest development for the relaunch is the Intute Institutional Repository Search. It will be a search engine for university digital repositories, allowing researchers to easily find academic material in one place.
Caroline Williams, Intute’s executive director, says the search engine has gathered data from 86 institutions, and that number is growing.
The university launched Intute in the summer of 2006. At the time, it was touted in Britain as a “rival to Google.”
Hefty claim, but perhaps not without merit. The search engine was created specifically for British students (though it’s openly accessible to students everywhere) and is closely monitored by a consortium of seven British universities, including Oxford. “Subject experts” — from academics to librarians — scour the Web for the most relevant sources they can find with the aid of automated processes. In addition, users can suggest relevant sites for review. The goal is to ferret out the most useful and relevant academic information in the sea of Internet drudge.
“Compared to Google, we’re very small,” Ms. Williams says. “We focus on quality, rather than quantity.”
While she says there is no current plan to go international with the contributing consortium, she notes that a significant number of hits on Intute’s site comes from the U.S.—Hurley Goodall