Re: Article: Scientists get their own Google

From: Tomasso (tom_at_r.so.com)
Date: 11/22/04 

Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 21:34:11 GMT

"Robert Karl Stonjek" <stonjek@ozemail.com.au> wrote in message news:YRrod.45070$K7.5245@news-server.bigpond.net.au...
> Scientists get their own Google
> Declan Butler
> New search engine ranks papers by importance, and finds the free versions.
>
> Google Scholar searches for scientific articles instead of web pages.
>
> © Google Media box
>
> Imagine searching the Internet and being able to restrict your results to academic texts. Today Google launched a free search engine that aims to do just that. Google Scholar searches only journal articles, theses, books, preprints, and technical reports across any area of research.

> A test version of the search engine is available at http://scholar.google.com, so you can try it out. In a search for the phrase "human genome", for example, a normal Google web search throws back 450,000 or so hits, with genome centres and databases and other websites ranked top.

> In contrast, Google Scholar returns just 113,000 hits, and all the top-ranked items are not websites but seminal papers on the subject. In fact, the number one hit is the landmark article "Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome"1 published in Nature in 2001.

> Full Text at Nature http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041115/full/041115-13.html

> Posted by Robert Karl Stonjek.

I think it has a LONG way to go. Citeseer is a much more useful source (for Math/ CS/ Physics). A lot of the Google returns are to subscriber (scientific publishing) sites which (also) have a long way to go to be user friendly (such as linking citation lists).

Of course in scholarship you "should" cover all original sources, but typically only notables are included. To do that, you either go to the library or pay a fortune in download fees.

What will the scene be like in 12 months? In five years? In twenty? I guess the web/no fee journals will win. But it will be a hard fight.

Tomasso.