Scirus (2001 - 2014)

scirus was elsevier's free science search engine, launched in 2001 and reaching 167 million indexed pages. it looked past journals into patents and the pages researchers kept on department servers, and it was genuinely good at it. then google scholar arrived, did most of the same job inside a box everyone already used, and elsevier decided catching up was not worth the money. the site was retired…