SEARCH ENGINES

VADS CORNER — Web search · Medical and scientific search · Asia-Pacific
Links checked 20 October 2026 (see “About the links” for the ones marked †)

This is the updated version of this page. The original version is archived at oldsearch.html.

When this page began, a search engine was a place you went to find a web page. Most of the engines on the first edition have since closed or changed beyond recognition, and the more useful question now is which tool to use for which kind of question. So this list is arranged by use: general web search first, then the places to search the medical and scientific literature, the newer AI-assisted tools and general AI assistants, trial registers, drug and regulator databases, preprints, and indexes from Asia-Pacific. The aim is to get you from a question to the original source quickly. Sites that are free to use carry a green FREE flag.

A short method. For a medical question, start in PubMed, not a general engine. Use the AI tools below to find and summarise, then open the paper they cite and read it yourself; these tools can cite a paper that does not say what they claim. Check the figure, the population and whether the result was statistically significant before you rely on it.

FREE a public-sector or non-profit database that is free to search (PubMed, the trial registers, DailyMed), or a service that states it is free. No flag means a commercial service: it may have a free tier, a trial or a subscription, and I say which where I could tell. NEW added in this edition † could not be opened by the automated check; see the end of the page

Which tool for which question?

A quick guide.

A clinical question: PubMed, then TRIP or the Cochrane Library for reviews and guidelines. · A paper you half remember: Google Scholar. · A trial: ClinicalTrials.gov. · A drug label: DailyMed. · A Malaysian product or study: see Asia-Pacific. · A page that has vanished: Wayback Machine †.

On this page:
General web search Literature search AI-assisted search General AI assistants Evidence summaries and guidelines Trial registers Drugs and regulators Preprints Asia-Pacific People, archives and reference Related Vads Corner pages About the links

General web search

Google — still the broadest index. Use the search operators (site:, filetype:, quotation marks) to narrow it.
Bing — Microsoft’s engine, the successor to MSN Search on the first edition of this page.
DuckDuckGo — searches without profiling you.
Brave Search † — an independent index, not a re-skin of Google or Bing. NEW
Startpage † — Google results without the tracking. NEW
Ecosia — an engine that puts its profits into climate projects and tree planting. NEW
Dogpile — a metasearch engine; it was on the first edition and is still running.
Perplexity — a general answer engine with cited sources, free with a paid tier. It is not a clinical tool, so use it to find sources, not to settle a medical question. NEW

Regional engines

Useful when the material you need is in Chinese or Korean and Google does not surface it. NEW

Baidu † (China) · Naver † (South Korea)

Literature search

The places to search the published medical and scientific literature. For the journals themselves, see Medical Journals; for search technique, see Medline.

PubMed (US National Library of Medicine) — the main index of biomedical literature. Start here. Advanced search builds a structured query. FREE
PubMed Central — the free full-text archive. FREE · Europe PMC — free full text and preprints, searched with PubMed records. FREE
Google Scholar — broad academic search, good for a paper you only half remember. FREE
Semantic Scholar — free academic search with short AI summaries of papers. FREE NEW
OpenAlex — an open catalogue of scholarly works, authors and institutions; good for mapping a field. FREE NEW
CORE — the world’s largest collection of open-access research papers, from repositories worldwide. FREE NEW
The Lens † — scholarly works and patents together. NEW
Cochrane Library — systematic reviews of treatments.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) — the index I use to confirm that a journal is genuinely open access. FREE
Scopus — citation database (subscription).

AI-assisted search

Read this first. These tools answer a question in prose and attach references. They are quick, and they are useful for finding papers. They can also misstate what a paper found, and an answer that sounds confident is not evidence. Always open the cited paper and check the number, the population and the significance yourself. Pricing and who may use each tool change often, so check the tool’s own page.

Vera Health — evidence search and synthesis for clinicians, covering more than 60 million papers by its own description. It says it is free to licensed healthcare professionals and medical students worldwide. NEW
EvidenceMD — cited answers to clinical questions; it says it is free to start in every country without a US NPI, with paid plans beyond that. NEW
OpenEvidence † — the best-known of these tools, with cited answers to clinical questions, free to verified users. It is built for US clinicians: sign-up relies on a US National Provider Identifier (NPI) or US institutional credentials, and reviewers report that it is hard or impossible to use elsewhere, and that it has withdrawn from the UK and EU. I have not confirmed whether it is open to clinicians in Malaysia, so check before you rely on it. NEW
Consensus — searches the academic literature and shows where studies agree; free tier with paid plans. NEW
Elicit — finds papers and extracts data for literature reviews; free tier with paid plans. NEW
Undermind — a deeper, slower literature search that keeps looking until it runs out of relevant papers; free and paid options. NEW
scite — shows whether later papers support or dispute a study (paid). NEW

General AI assistants

The general-purpose chat assistants. Most people now use one of these as a first stop, alongside or instead of a search engine. They are not medical search tools: they answer fluently from what they were trained on and from any web search they run, and they make mistakes. Use them to explain, summarise, draft and find leads, then confirm anything that matters in PubMed or the original source. Do not paste anything that identifies a patient. Free tiers, paid plans and the countries each is available in change often, so check the service itself.

Claude (Anthropic) NEW
ChatGPT (OpenAI) NEW
Gemini (Google) NEW · NotebookLM † (Google) — answers only from the papers and documents you upload, which makes it useful for working through a set of papers you have already chosen. NEW
Copilot (Microsoft) NEW
Grok (xAI), with real-time answers from the web and X NEW
DeepSeek (China) — the chat app is linked from the home page. NEW
Kimi (Moonshot AI, China) NEW · Qwen (Alibaba, China) NEW
Mistral (France) NEW

Evidence summaries and guidelines

TRIP — search for systematic reviews and guidelines together; free search with a paid Pro tier.
Epistemonikos — a database of systematic reviews and the primary studies behind them. NEW
NICE guidance (United Kingdom) FREE · Guidelines International Network — the network of guideline developers worldwide. NEW
UpToDate · DynaMed — point-of-care clinical references (subscription, often through a hospital or university).

Trial registers

Registers show what trials exist, what they planned to measure and, often, what they found. Comparing the planned outcomes with the published ones is one of the better ways to spot selective reporting.

ClinicalTrials.gov (US National Library of Medicine) FREE
WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) † — one search across the national registers. FREE NEW
Clinical Trials Information System (CTIS), European Union FREE NEW · ISRCTN (United Kingdom) FREE NEW
Asia-Pacific registers: National Medical Research Register, Malaysia FREE NEW · ANZCTR (Australia and New Zealand) FREE NEW · CTRI (India) FREE NEW · ChiCTR (China) FREE NEW · jRCT (Japan) FREE NEW

Drugs and regulators

DailyMed — current US drug labels. FREE · Drugs@FDA — approvals, review documents and labels. FREE
European Medicines Agency — medicines — European assessment reports and product information. FREE NEW
Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods (ARTG) FREE NEW
QUEST3+ product search † — Malaysia’s National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency (NPRA) register of registered products, from the NPRA site. FREE NEW
MIMS Malaysia — drug directory and prescribing information for the region.
DrugBank — drug, target and interaction data; free for some uses and licensed for others. NEW

Preprints

Preprints are posted before peer review. They are useful for speed, but treat the findings as provisional and look for the published version.

medRxiv — health sciences. FREE · bioRxiv — biology. FREE
Research Square · Preprints.org — multidisciplinary platforms. NEW

Asia-Pacific

Much regional research never reaches PubMed. These indexes cover journals that general engines handle poorly.

MyJurnal † — Malaysian academic journals, from the Ministry of Higher Education. NEW
Global Index Medicus † — the WHO portal to the regional indexes, including those from Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific. FREE NEW
IMSEAR (Index Medicus for the South-East Asia Region) FREE NEW · WPRIM (Western Pacific Region Index Medicus) FREE NEW
J-STAGE — Japanese journals, many free to read. NEW
KoreaMed — Korean medical journals. NEW · Korea Citation Index † NEW
CNKI † (China) · Airiti Library (Taiwan) — Chinese-language journals, mostly by subscription. NEW

People, archives and reference

ORCID — a unique identifier for researchers; the surest way to tell two authors with the same name apart. FREE NEW
Internet Archive Wayback Machine † — old versions of web pages, including many that have gone. FREE NEW
MedlinePlus — plain-language health information from the US National Library of Medicine. FREE · WHO IRIS — the WHO repository of its own publications and guidance. FREE NEW

Medical Journals · Medline · Medical sites · Occupational health sites
Kerbside Consult · Cybermed archive

About the links

Checked 20 October 2026. Each link was opened by an automated check on that date. Where a site would not load for the checker, it carries a †. A † means the check could not read the page (a bot block or a robots rule), not that the link is dead. If one fails for you, tell me.
How I decided on FREE. A service gets the flag if it is a public-sector or non-profit database that is free to search, or its own site says it is free. I did not flag a service from memory. Commercial tools change their free tiers often, so for those I describe the model and you should check it on the tool’s own page.
What happened to the first edition. Most of the 2005 list has closed or been absorbed. AltaVista, KartOO and Scirus are among those that are gone. The original page is kept at oldsearch.html for the record.
Not medical advice. A search result, and especially an AI-generated answer, is not a substitute for your doctor.

Disclaimer · cyberdoc@vadscorner.com