Using the informant for searching for analytical chemistry information on the World Wide Web

For someone wanting to find what information is available on the WWW in the area of analytical chemistry. The Informant is a quick and easy way to get started. As this facility improves, and others like it are developed, these personal search agent engines will become more prevalent. While not a real alternative to the commercial databases for chemical information, these are a cheap and easy way to get started. They are also a good way to learn how to create and modify search profiles. Over time I would expect that all journal publishers will finally get themselves organized and make the names of authors, titles of papers, and abstracts of their journals available via the WWW, and these intelligent search agent engines will become very valuable tools for chemists. Besides obtaining information much faster from the journal publishers (as opposed to the secondary information services such as ISI and Chemical Abstracts Service who need to wait until they get the journal information from the publisher) one will be able to get this information at no cost, which should reduce the need and cost of searching DIALOG, Queste-Orbit, CAS/STN, and other such fee-based information services. This notion of using the Internet as a first step in a search process is not new, but it has not yet come to chemistry. With a little effort on the part of journal publishers, good intelligent agents, and an informed community of users, this process may well become one of the really practical and useful aspects of the Internet.