Google Indexing PubMed Documents

I believe this is new. Am I wrong?

[atadams]

I noticed today when searching on a few medical terms that Google was returning abstracts from PubMed. When I checked in February, Google didn't seem to have any of PubMed's abstracts in their index (I suspected because of the complicated URLs PubMed uses), now there are ~579,000 abstracts listed. It seems they may have done some custom indexing of PubMed's database. Notice that the title Google lists in the SERPs is the title of the abstract, not the title of the web page.

[google.com...]

For those who don't know, PubMed is the National Institutes of Health's bibliographic database for medical papers. It contains more than 11 million citations and abstracts of medical research.

This is great news (if it is new - I may be wrong) for the searching public. The news media is absolutely terrible at reporting medical research. It will be extremely helpful for Google's users to have greater access to the source material.

[vincevincevince]

hey, it's only abstracts... and we all know what damage can be done by going by abstracts alone...

i welcome this indexing, but wish it was the full articles!

and maybe google is reading their XML feeds?

[mcavic]

Those urls have 4 or 5 variables. Yep, I think that's a new feature.

[atadams]

hey, it's only abstracts... and we all know what damage can be done by going by abstracts alone...

Not nearly as much damage as some knucklehead reporter who's only read the abstract and has no idea what the implications are. I'd rather people read an abstract before some overblown headline.

Most of the full text articles aren't going to be available unless you subscribe to the individual journals. The abstracts are what you get when you search PubMed anyway. At least they are indexing those.

[twilight47]

If you can search the same abstracts directly, why would I want Google indexing them, so others not knowing find the abstract and then find they need to pay for the subscriber service to see the full article. Is Google getting a referal kickback?