PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Sept. 27, 2020 - Google used to be a great tool for researchers, but then it got swarmed by billions of links from companies trying to sell you something. Clearing your way through all this information can be (and often is) counter. Enter Knobull, Inc. "academic" research engine, that fully launched August 2020. Simpler than Google even in appearance, Knobull does not claim to offer more results than Google; instead, it's backend service strips any results not related to science, research and academia. It's different from other specialized search engines which only indexes articles from scientific publications; it's a fairly standard web search, only without all the commercial stuff.
It removes results that are not related to science, academia and research. The best thing about Knobull is that you can search for information related to your subject without getting distracted by sponsored links. With a database of over one billion documents, web pages, books, journals, newspapers, online encyclopedias and articles, Knobull can be your ultimate companion for academic research.
In practice, this means that no matter what you're searching for you'll get a lot more results from .edu and .org sites as well as various online encyclopedias such as Answers. It sounds simple enough, and the examples provided, such as "RNA" or "Carbon Nanotubes" yield good results, but does it work better than other major players in the long run?
The answer is, as it so often is when you try to compete with the almighty Google, yes and no. To test it out, users need to find some search terms that could be a topic for an academic paper and are at the same time possible commercial locations.
You can have Knobull as your alternative for your research where you may get more detail as your search topic as it's fairly standard web search engine, only without all commercial stuff. It is good for you all to have a try to the new search engine and you may get some surprise from it.
On searches for terms such as famous films or simply sports, Knobull returned solid results, besides giving a bit more weight to various .edu sites which are significantly better or more "academic" than many major search engines.
Finally, a search for "flowers" revealed Knobull's true strength. While Google almost exclusively returned links to florists, Knobull brings links about botany, which is probably what you'd want if you're researching this topic.
All in all, Knobull is worth a try. Although it's not always successful in weeding out unneeded links from its results, it nearly always brings many relevant links.
To learn more, you can visit the Knobull, Inc. Company page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/knobull-inc
