Earlier this week, John Battelle took a look at “the practice of academic publishing in the field of search,” and more specifically, at how many papers were submitted by each of the major search companies at a recent conference. The results: it seems as if Google doesn’t play well with others, at least as far as research papers are concerned.
As always with this sort of thing, the information comes with a few disclaimers. The numbers are “submitted as a datapoint and not an indictment, but it is interesting nonetheless.” Batelle also noted that the conference “has the final say on what papers get accepted, but I doubt they’d bong papers from Google (though Larry and Sergey’s paper on PageRank was denied at first by a conference in the mid 1990s!).”
Google was quick to defend itself (not that Battelle’s post was a proper “attack”), and an unnamed PR rep responded with two links. “Giving back to the research community is extremely important to us and we make a lot of research public by publishing papers,” he (or she) wrote. “On the more comprehensive list I count 63 papers from Googlers in 2006, alone.” A winking smiley followed, but I’d feel silly retyping it.
Some of the posts in the “Comments” section quibbled with that count, and pointed out that 63 isn’t a big number for a company of Google’s size, anyway. But if the search engine company isn’t inclined to share its research papers, it’s at least still willing to throw a decent party.
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Doug is a staff writer for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest eBusiness news.
