Google introduces an academic-focused search engine

o, wait...

I'm skeptical of what it may become, though -- it seems to be opt-in, and (okay I haven't followed Ned's link) I'm not sure if there is any sort of informed review process to see who does and doesn't get through the door. In my fields, I don't want to type in "Nikola Tesla" or "Filioque controversy" and end up, respectively, with bargain basement Forteans and fundamentalist revealed historians.

sorry, this is crap (as yet). It doesn't bring up nearly what a current university library's website would. Big, obvious names and connections ("Dickens Marxism" say) give a lot, but big whoop. "Acapulco Typology" (an 80s era mass communication theory) = big fat zip.

what's interesting is that this seems like a microsoft-y move, academic searches and indexes are a low-glamour grind, there are dozens of overlapping resources, but it must make some money for someone, so there you go.

Although that in itself wouldn't say much -- I fucking HATE WoK.

It would be a big help.

To know there might be peer-reviewed serious stuff available is a great thing. As long as it isnt going to end up costing a subscription...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=companion+forms&btnG=Search

to

http://www.scholar.google.com/scholar?q=companion+forms&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Search

First and foremost: WoK contains journal references, but no links. So after you search, you've got to open new windows, find the journal, and find the article. Google links directly to the article.

#of citations -- very cool

WoK never seems to find the stuff I'm looking for. Typically, I find it easier to go to a large publisher's site (e.g. Elsevier Science) and search all of their journals instead.

look, research is not easy, but i don't trust this thing to really do it right. why, i don't know, since google did ok at being google and all... it's the totalizing impulse that rubs me wrong i guess.

Anything involving multiple authors and journals; as well as work that I am seeing for the first time involves more careful thought and searching.

Yet another mechanism to make plagiarism easier, too.
If anything, it makes plagiarism more difficult. The internet is already the number one plagiarism-catcher -- an improved academic search engine will only make it easier to get caught.

I'm not sure how much this will really affect plagiarism -- it might make sorting or gauging searched material easier, but not in ways that really affect the "would this be a good paper to steal from or not" factor, and the plagiarizing kids often seem to be the ones perfectly happy to stick to regular google. (I have been told by one sophomore that Google is better than the search engines available through the university because Google covers the whole internet, after all.)

Basically, I couldn't see it doing a better job than an actual database.

I'd say it may have some use as a back-up system - as it's quick and easy to use if you're looking for stuff straight away, or don't have access to databases. For professional use it's limited.

I think this will be the key thing, and it's not bad for that reason -- not everyone does have such access, and it's good that there's a tool out there which provides a general guide which will hopefully improve more with time and commentary. And Orbit's point about the citation counter is a very good one, that's quite handy.

http://print.google.com/

Very much so. Nicole's posted a few times referring to various L-N searches she's done, and a number of patrons I encounter at my library regularly use it as well.

strangely, my lexis-nexis search for "fuck washing a hat" turned up 0 results.

stick researchers in, count citations, give grade ;)

The letter to Google from the Association of American University Presses, which represents 125 non-profit-making academic publishers, is just the latest in a series of criticisms.

The Association wants clarification on 16 questions and claims the book-scanning scheme "appears to involve systematic infringement of copyright on a massive scale."

Its members depend on book sales and other licensing agreements for the majority of their revenues. They are worried that if users can get the information they want from its books by searching them online, they won't bother to buy them.

---

Google said in a statement on Monday that it offers protection to copyright holders. For newer books still in copyright, users will only see a list of contents and a few sentences of text.

Only older, out-of-copyright books from Oxford University and from the New York Public Library will be scanned into the Google system.

Digitising books is still super-classic.

The University of California libraries today (Wednesday) announced their partnership with Google to digitize books from the libraries' collections. UC becomes the latest partner in the Google Books Library Project, which was launched in December 2004 to digitize books drawn from the libraries of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University, and the New York Public Library.

The digitized books will be searchable through Google Book Search. Google respects copyright law and has specifically designed Book Search to comply with it. Anyone will be able to freely view, browse and read UC's public domain books, including many of the treasures in the libraries' historic and special collections.

For books protected by copyright, users just get basic background (such as the book's title and the author's name), at most a few lines of text related to their search, and information about where they can borrow or buy the book.

If publishers or authors don't want to have their books digitized, they will be excluded.

I have a hard time believing that Google can dance around the law on this - digitizing, selling ad space, getting revenue from books sales, without prior consent of copyright holders (and I find Google's new 'copyrighted works won't really be available line suspect - what, exactly, are they going to digitize that isn't copyrighted? That's the last seventy years of publications).