More Details On Google Scholar
Resource Shelf's Shirl Kennedy and Gary Price have a look inside Google Scholar. Among the intersting tidbits:

• The index isn't entirely human-edited. It works off a crawler that reads web content and makes a guess as to what is scholarly content. Since the term "scholarly" is so vague that even librarians can't be sure what it exactly means, Google has put a lot of work into designing a crawler to figure it out.
• Google Scholar results will show up in Google searches.
• Google Scholar will not contain ads, at least for now (much like any Google beta project).
• Google Scholar may be allowed by some publishers to index an entire file, even if users will have to subscribe for premium content (much like Google News).
• Google won't say yet how big the database is.

They also wonder how many people will find Google Scholar results and pay for the information, when they could access it for free at their local library. Google Scholar doesn't allow searching by date published, which could be very important for some searches. Also, the article notes that while Google is crawling the web for new articles, no one knows when the index is actually updated. Looks like Google has gotten a bit of a "black eye" from the Google Images debacle.
(via The Unofficial Google Weblog)
- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 11/22/2004 04:56:00 PM