Thursday, November 18, 2004
Google Scholar
Google has just launched
a new search engine for academic papers scholar.google.com. Google has
received permission from some publishers to allow searching through
their papers that would normally not be available for Google to
crawl. Based on random checking, it seems ACM for example is allowing
Google to see their papers but not Elsevier.
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Caveat Note: I am a self-admitted Google fan.
ReplyDeleteJust been playing with scholar.google.com. I really like it. I'm not sure it does everything citeseer does (yet), but it does all the important things. And it is much faster and will hopefully have better reliability than citeseer. It's also nice that it seems to cover science more widely than just computer science. As a believer in cross-fertilization across fields, I think this will be a nice feature.
A few questions spring to mind. First is how much stuff Google can get into their system. I'm hoping that since Google has significant clout -- more than citeseer -- the publishers will be convinced they need to have their papers indexed by Google. The second is whether this service will pay for itself. I've heard the idea is to eventually put ads on it -- a person interesting in articles on cloning will get an ad for cloning services -- but I'm not sure this business model is that convincing. The money issue is also important because if Google can get more money to the publishers (either directly through payments or indirectly by funneling customers) they will be more inspired to use the service. The third question is the (eventual) relationship between this service, electronic publication services like arxiv, and actual journals. But that's a big open question.
Google is great, agreed, but do we let one corporation do everything?
ReplyDeletewe let it search, then we told it our browsing habits, we made it as an index of popularity (My research group is #1 on G!), it took up usenet, it told us news, we told it about our friends, acquaintances social network and interests, we shared our dairy, then we had no qualms when it read through our email (in fact, we are impressed (happy?) when it shows us "relavant" ads), it can also search our machines, if rumors are to be believed a new browser is soon to be imposed on us and now we want it to become G-arxiv and soon our science standard as well?
We are letting one company grow on us. its looking dangerous. Power corrupts and absolute power ...
cynically (but portentously) yours,
B
P.S. is there no datin'G' service?
Google is doing a great service to researchers by making information on searchable scholarly articles available. I am very happy to see a good indexing of research papers in social sciences in particular. It is also making citation information of articles/papers available, which is very useful. I wish scholar google succeeds in bringing information on all important research materials under its fold.
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