ChemFinder.Com > About ChemFinder.Com > ChemFinder & ChemINDEX > How do ChemFinder & ChemINDEX work? On the face of it, a way to search for chemical compounds over the World Wide Web is not a novel concept. WWW-based chemical search engines (the original Macintosh version of ChemFinder among them) have existed since at least mid-1995. General-purpose databases of WWW contents (such as Yahoo and Alta Vista) have existed far longer. So what's the deal with ChemFinder? The key, you might say, is in the chemistry. It's one thing to pop over to Lycos and do a search for all references to Aluminum Hydroxide. It's another thing to actually find them -- especially if the information you want is at a site in Australia under the listing Aluminium Hydroxide. Or if there is simply a passing mention of the compound with CAS RN 21645-51-2. Or a compound with the molecular formula Al(OH)3. By working from a single master list of chemical compounds, ChemFinder avoids these problems, and lets you find the information you want, faster. In generating this database, we have also taken pains to identify and correct the obvious errors (like 'mehtyl', as well as invalid CAS RNs) that account for 3-5% of of all chemical information on the WWW. Very likely we have introduced some new and exciting mistakes of our own, but we are confident that the overall quality of ChemFinder data far surpasses the bulk of the information that it indexes. Because ChemFinder is a chemical database, it can also provide information that a general-purpose WWW index cannot, including physical property data and 2D chemical structures. This information is somewhat sparse at the moment, but is very good for the several thousand most-common compounds. We are constantly working on getting more data, and we expect ChemFinder only to keep improving. As an almost-incidental side benefit, the list of sites indexed is also the largest single list of chemical information sites (by at least double the size of the next-largest) that we are aware of. ©2004 CambridgeSoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Statement Email   / Tel  1 800 315-7300 / 1 617 588-9300     Fax  1 617 588-9390     EU Tel  00 800 875 20000 / +44 1223 464900     EU Fax  +44 1223 464990     Germany Tel  +49 69 2222 2280     France Tel  +33 1 70 71 98 80 CambridgeSoft Corporation, 100 CambridgePark Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA CambridgeSoft Corporation, 1 Signet Court, Swann's Road, Cambridge CB5 8LA UK All trademarks are the property of their respective holders.