Self-Referential

Rich Apodaca — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:19:00 +0000

One of the strange things about writing a blog is stumbling on your own work in Google's search results. In doing some research for a talk, I noticed that Depth-First articles appear at the top of many Google searches. I'm not sure what to make of this, but for what it's worth, here are some unquoted Google search terms that currently return a Depth-First article in the top-three results:

free chemistry databases Number two. Currently, the hit is being lit up by users of StumbleUpon.
ruby cheminformatics Number one. This one's not surprising, given how new the language is to cheminformatics, and how much of what's available is on Depth-First. The top result shows how to programatically connect to NMRShiftDB with Ruby.
2d structure editor Number one. Google sure doesn't waste any time because the link is only five days old.
cheminformatics scripting Number one and two. This one is surprising given the large amount of work done in the area, especially with Python, Perl and proprietary languages.
inchi parse Number one. The link discusses the InChI parser Ninja.
structure diagram generation Number one. This one is also surprising given how few articles on the subject appear on Depth-First.
pubchem ftp Number three, after two links from the PubChem site itself.
sd file html Number three. The hit describes a small Ruby program to convert SD files to a Web-ready HTML fileset.
chemistry web 2.0 Number one. I don't much care for the term "Web 2.0", but it's too useful to ignore. The hit actually talks about how little progress has been made in chemically-enabling the Web over the last eleven years. The fourth hit links to Andrew Walkingshaw's excellent talk that is more to the point.

Image Credit: rabinal

Depth-First: Tag first

Self-Referential