Better, faster, easier

Today the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) launches its new, faster and easier website with an exhaustive search engine at its centre. The web interface has been streamlined on the basis of user feedback from a recent extensive survey, giving a new homepage that brings users, within one click, to the service they need. Behind this new web interface lies the ‘EB-eye’, a powerful search engine allowing instant searches of all the EBI’s databases from a single query.

“If you can use Google™ you can use this,” says Graham Cameron, Associate Director of the EMBL-EBI. Crucially, navigating links between databases has become a lot easier; genomes, genes, proteins, structures and biological functions can all be explored through a single simple interface. Jargon and acronyms have been banished wherever possible, and have been replaced with terminology in common scientific usage. Expert users, however, have not been abandoned and can still immerse themselves in the detail of the specialist databases.

This new interface exploits work in many projects at the EMBL-EBI, with a range of funders including the EMBL Member States, UK funding agencies and the European Commission. In particular, the Commission’s support for work funded through the “TEMBLOR” and “EMBRACE” projects has helped to make the creation of the new website possible, as has support from the European Patent Office.

Tags: database, search engine