Google Scholar Beta

"search specifically for scholarly literature"

[whoisgregg]

Please let us know if you have suggestions, questions or comments about Google Scholar. We recognize the debt we owe to all those in academia whose work has made Google itself a reality and we hope to make Google Scholar as useful to this community as possible. We believe everyone should have a chance to stand on the shoulders of giants.

[scholar.google.com...]

Includes search modifiers such as "author:, lots of non-html file types, and results include the number of times the source has been cited. Sample result for "search engine" search:

[PDF] The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine
S Brin, L Page - View as HTML - Cited by 1087
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale. Hypertextual Web Search Engine. ... We have built a
large-scale search engine which addresses many of the problems of existing systems. ...
Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 1998 - kulturinformatik.uni-lueneburg.de - firstrate.co.nz - net.cs.pku.edu.cn - scalab.uc3m.es - all 69 versions »

Google Blog description:
[google.com...]

[edited by: ciml at 3:56 am (utc) on Nov. 20, 2004]
[edit reason] Link added by request. [/edit]

[ciml]

Nice clean results. I particularly like the clustering of documents containing the same paper.

[newwebster]

I have to commend Google for Scholar. I am finding all kinds of useful information on subjects. This is what a search engine should be. Excellent work Google, you deserve a pat on the back or a $20 a share increase for this.

[suidas]

I for one am very excited about the possibilities here. It's nice to see Page Rank return to it's roots as a way to judge the importance of academic papers by analyzing their citations.

I'm interested to know this will integrate with the regular Google results. For example, once Google tags something as a bona fide academic resource, how will this information be used? It might be nice to ensure that scholarly results always appear, just as Google is said to ensure its results contains both commercial and non-commercial results. After all, when I type "Alexander the Great" into Google, I might be looking for movie products, I might be looking for popular history, and I might be looking for scholarly papers. It would be unfortunate if the Google Scholar results were essentially minus-ed from the regular results.

I don't know how it works in the sciences, but there are problems with the humanities. For example, going with "Alexander the Great" again, you get a surprising number of books with titles that referecne Alexander only as a chronological marker, eg., "The Origins of War: From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great." More generally, as a topic I know, I can say the list doesn't look like it's organized by academic importance. Everything there is correctly identified as a useful academic resource, but the order is pretty random.

I understand the system uses articles. Will they syllabi? To my mind, syllabi ought to be easy to identify automatically. They tend to have a section with fairly standard source citations. And they are a very good gauge to a certain sort of academic credibility.

[Robert Charlton]

I think the beta is extremely exciting. Serps give you the quantity and (if you click on the number) the source of citations. Right now it's obvious the database is just being populated. Only 6 citations for the #1 result for "francois truffaut," eg.

The Library Search is a great feature... It's a link (along with a Web Search link) that appears next to book titles returned in serps. Click it and you'll be prompted for your zip code... enter that, and a list of libraries that hold the book, along with their distance from you, and other library information, is returned.

If you click Web Search next to a book title, you'll get regular Google web serps for a search on the title and author.

It might be nice to ensure that scholarly results always appear, just as Google is said to ensure its results contains both commercial and non-commercial results.

My guess is that the integration would have to be via some sort of personalization, be it "invisible tabs" or a slider control or whatever (and maybe that's where Google is headed). Otherwise, I don't see how a lot of these scholarly resources could possibly rank, as citations vrs web links is really apples and oranges.

Thanks Google... this is great.

[valeyard]

This looks excellent, well done Google (it's a while since I've said that!)

One suggestion: it would be nice to distinguish between links to the full text of a paper and links to abstracts.

[vincevincevince]

I cannot agree more with valeyard - it really needs a checkbox "Only show full text available". This would put pressure on publishers to give free full text access.

In the past I have reported a number of these journal publishers for cloaking as the snippets obtained or links to PDF were either blatently not present on the page, or redirected to an HTML abstract. Now this very practice is supported by the 'About' text for scholar search. It seems that Google has gone soft of cloaking?

[whoisgregg]

Discussion continues here:

Google Rolls Out Search Product for Scholars
[webmasterworld.com...]

Imaster had it first and has link to press release. :)