THE DEBUT OF GOOGLE SCHOLAR
Google is adding a new search service geared toward the needs of academic and scientific researchers, offering a central starting point for scholarly literature like peer-reviewed papers, books, abstracts and technical reports. The new search tool, accessible at scholar.google.com, is the result of collaboration with a number of scientific and academic publishers, including ACM, Nature, IEEE and OCLC. The new service initially will be advertisement-free, but company executives say that will change. "The commercial reason for doing this is that you can target areas with high-quality, high-payback ads," says John Sack, director of Stanford University’s HighWire Press. "An advertisement that goes next to an article on cloning techniques is probably going to be for services that are pretty expensive." SearchEngineWatch editor Danny Sullivan says Google’s latest move is "a significant step forward," adding that Google likely will have competition soon from Yahoo and others. "We will continue to see an explosion of vertical search engines like this," he notes, referring to search services that focus on special collections.
New York Times 18 Nov 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/18/technology/18google.html>
And more news on Google Scholar…
Excerpt from “Google Scholar Offers Access To Academic Information”: ‘Google has worked with publishers to gain access to some material that wouldn’t ordinarily be accessible to search spiders, because it is locked behind subscription barriers….But Google’s made arrangements with publishers to get into these password areas. The advantage is that suddenly, searchers have a much better ability to locate material that may be of interest. However, it also means that actually trying to read the full-text of such documents — which Google does index — will only be possible for those who have relationships with the publishing sites. Google says, by the way, that it does not earn money off of any new subscriptions generated between searchers and publishers…. When spidering the content, Google has worked to understand who the authors of the papers are, as well as the formal titles of the papers and other documents that cite the material. These citations are a key part of the special ranking algorithm used by Google for Google Scholar. Google says the citation extractions allows it to see the connections between papers even if these connections are not made through links. As a result, it can use citation analysis to try and put the best papers at the top of the results….The same paper may be hosted in more than one place, of course. In these instances, Google picks what it believes is the best version and provides links to other versions after the paper’s description. In some cases, the material is not actually online. Google may know about a paper only through references it has seen on other papers. In these cases, a Library Search and Web Search link will appear next to the paper or book’s title.’
Search Engine Watch, November 18, 2004.
<http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3437471>
