Google continues its role as the leading search engine innovator with the live beta launch of Google Scholoar.
Principal engineer Anurag Acharya announced Google Scholar in a post today in the Google Blog. Anurag states:
“Today we are launching the beta version of a service which we hope will help this process. Google Scholar is a free service that helps users search scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports.
Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article’s author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to aren’t online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.
We at Google have benefited much from academic research. This is one of the ways in which we are giving back to the research community. We hope Google Scholar will help all of us stand on the shoulders of giants.”
In my test searches approximately 75% of the results returned were PDF documents. I wonder if licensing aggreements are what is giving Google access to this content.
John Battelle reveals in his Searchblog that this project was created during the 20% time allocated for Google programmers to dream up new ventures. That’s an amazing concept in itself.
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