Chmoogle and ChemDB: free chemical information

This week saw the announcement of a new free chemistry information database: Chmoogle, by eMolecules Inc.

From their mission statement:

Chmoogle® is the leading open-access chemistry search engine. Chmoogle's mission is to discover, curate and index all of the public chemical information in the world, and make it available to the public for free. Chmoogle distinguishes itself by extremely fast searches, an appealing presentation of results, high-quality chemical drawings, and powerful advanced search capabilities like persistent hitlists and hitlist logic operations.

My librarian warning light went off a little at this item from their FAQ:

What are Chmoogle's sources?

Chmoogle discovers sources of chemical data by searching the internet, and receives submissions from data providers such as chemical suppliers and academic researchers.

A little more specificity would be nice ("the internet" is a tad bit broad).

In comparison, ChemDB, a new public database of small molecules based at UC Irvine, provides the following about their sources:

Chemical Vendors: All of the vendors who have supplied their chemical information catalogs that comprise the core data beneath ChemDB. The source information table includes a complete listing.

You can read more about the creation of ChemDB in this article, which has been accepted for publication in Bioinformatics.

Both of these new tools are certainly interesting in light of the recent discussions about open access to chemical data (cf. ACS, PubChem, etc.). I'd be interested to hear any chemists' reviews of Chmoogle and/or ChemDB...feel free to leave a comment below.