[lit-ideas] Google for Scientists and Scholars

From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 13:04:56 -0800

Google Plans New Service for Scientists and Scholars

November 18, 2004
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 17 - Google Inc. plans to announce on
Thursday that it is adding a new search service aimed at
scientists and academic researchers.

Google Scholar, which was scheduled to go online Wednesday
evening at scholar.google.com, is a result of the company's
collaboration with a number of scientific and academic
publishers and is intended as a first stop for researchers
looking for scholarly literature like peer-reviewed papers,
books, abstracts and technical reports.

Google executives declined to say how many additional
documents and books had been indexed and made searchable
through the service. While the great majority of recent
scholarly papers and periodicals are indexed on the Web,
many have not been easily accessible to the public.

The engineer who led the project, Anurag Acharya, said the
company had received broad cooperation from academic,
scientific and technical publishers like the Association of
Computing Machinery, Nature, the Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers and the Online Computer Library
Center.

The new Google service, which includes a listing of
scientific citations as well as ways to find materials at
libraries that are not online, will not initially include
the text advertisements that are shown on standard pages
for Google search results.

However, company executives say it is likely that
advertisements will eventually accompany search results on
Google Scholar. One academic publishing executive, John
Sack, director of HighWire Press at Stanford University,
said that such advertising could be quite profitable.

"The commercial reason for doing this is that you can
target areas with high-quality, high-payback ads," Mr. Sack
said. "An advertisement that goes next to an article on
cloning techniques is probably going to be for services
that are pretty expensive."

Mr. Acharya, who started the Google Scholar project, said
his motivation, in part, had been a desire to help the
academic community from which Google emerged.

"Google as a company has greatly benefited from academic
research and this is one of the ways we can give back to
the community," he said.

The project was also an effort, said Mr. Acharya, 39, to
address a problem he confronted as an undergraduate in
India. As a student he found materials in his college
library, at times, to be significantly out of date.

Google Scholar will make the world's scientific literature
universally accessible, he said.

"We don't know where the next breakthrough will come from,"
he said. "We want everyone to be able to stand on the
shoulders of giants."

"Google's scientific search service is a significant step
forward," said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchWatchEngine,
an online newsletter. He was quick to add, however, that
Google was certain to have competition soon from Yahoo and
others.

"We will continue to see an explosion of vertical search
engines like this," he said of search services that focus
on special collections.

Google Scholar is another reflection of changing habits in
the academic world, said Mr. Sack of HighWire Press. In the
past decade, students and researchers have begun to go to
online search engines first.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/18/technology/18google.html?ex=1101778270&ei=1&en=70c7b1d966a29337

yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com

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[lit-ideas] Google for Scientists and Scholars

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