A new search site is in beta called DeepDyve that has some promise. First, they claim that they index millions of medical papers from paid journals and free sites. The problem in the past is that this content wasn’t too readily available. Yes, there is Medline, but not a very user-friendly tool. Second, getting copies of the papers to read has never been easy, particularly for those of us in the lay community that don’t have medical center accounts or access to medical libraries.
This is where DeepDyve comes in. They charge a buck to rent the paper for 24 hours. You can get other “plans” that allow unlimited access for more money. Does this sound familiar, like renting movies? Got it. Their search engine is very simplistic — you can’t sort by date for example. But you can enter an entire abstract into the search query to narrow things down.