Lincus was a one-of-a-kind search engine that accepted scientific terms or passages as input, and returned a list of the most relevant experts. Data was sourced from publicly accessible, government funded, peer-reviewed sources, and rankings were verifiably accurate.

Experts were ranked according to relevance and prowess. Results could be adjusted to hone in on different personas, such as established experts, currently active experts, or what we called "rising stars." Filters were also available for area or institution.

Due to the networked & organic nature of reseach, it wasn't necessarily possible nor correct to assign empirical, ordinal rankings in results. To accommodate this, the ranking algorithm returned tiers of individuals instead of an ordinal list, and a network visualization was created as the primary representation of results.