The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 12:45:34 -0000
From: J Armitage <j.armitage@UNN.AC.UK>
Reply-To: Interdisciplinary academic study of Cyber Society
     <CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
To: CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: [CSL]: Google Plans New Service for Scientists and Scholars


[Hi all, Google Scholar is actually up and running already. It is here:
http://scholar.google.com/ <http://scholar.google.com/>  John]


November 18, 2004


Google Plans New Service for Scientists and Scholars


By JOHN MARKOFF



http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/18/technology/18google.html?oref=login
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/18/technology/18google.html?oref=login&th>
&th



The New York Times








SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 17 - Google
<http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.m
arketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=GOOG>  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
<http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.m
arketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=YHOO>  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.






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