Google Scholar: Not Ready for Prime Time?

reptilicus writes "The Thomson Gale publishing group has put together a comprehensive review of Google Scholar, and they find it highly lacking compared with similar offerings from Highwire Press, Scopus, and The Web of Science. Will Google's overhyped offerings drive these superior services out of the market?"

Comments

overhyped?

[brickballs]

overhyped

overhyped? I dont recall ever hearing of it. of course I havn't heard of the others either..

C'mon, people...

[gg3po]

...isn't this still in alpha or beta stage? Give'em a break, already.

Just remember.

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

Microsoft loved to put out something that was just good enough, but free to kill off everything else.

Google's advantage?

[mister_llah]

At least for now...

IT'S FREE!

[looking at the other options, they are NOT free]

===

I'd say in that regard, Google is way ahead...

Utterly shocking

[Otterley]

What? A company whose mission is to provide content and research services to academia gives a poor review to one of its up-and-coming competitors' offerings? Say it isn't so!

Re:Utterly shocking

[ScytheBlade1]

While you have a definite point, I believe that there may be a tad bit more to it than you make it out to be.

"whose mission is to provide content and research services to academia"

Also from that same page:
"with 2004 revenues from continuing operations of $8.10 billion"


You think...that's it's possible...that this company is doing it RIGHT? That it's possible that they know what they're talking about?

I'm not claiming to know the answer. I don't use either service, but after reading your post, the obvious jumped out...

Of course they're an apparent competitor. I just have this feeling, though, that they may actually know what they're doing. It's possible that you're right, it's possible that you're wrong, it's just that I don't see evidence as to either for a post like yours to hit +5 Insightful (which it is) without some counter-balance to it.

If their entire goal is to provide a similar service, and they've made $8.10 billion....something tells me that they're doing something right, which may actually give base to their claims.

Re:Utterly shocking

[anonicon]

Your point is made on the conflict of interest. But, if you read the review linked from the front page, it makes several key points about why Google's Scholar service is pretty poor. No structured XML/other output, no listed, covered research publications, no index- or directory-browsing options, no fuzzy logic operants for branch-defining a research institute's name wildcards, and much more.

Yes, it's free, but given the time and productivity constraints that the professionals who will be using this are under, this is the classic case of being free only if your time is worth nothing. For casual or non-professional related searches, that's fine; for this field, it's a timehole.

Of course, YMMV.

Re:Utterly shocking

[CheshireCatCO]

Microsoft (to trot out the obvious and tired example) makes a killing in the software market, but I don't trust their opinions of Linux.

And you can't read that much about knowledge into how much money a company makes. Profit is as much an art of marketing and keeping costs down as it is making a quality product. If quality equated with profit directly, we'd all be using Apple or IBM machines and no one would have Windows. (And McDonalds would be out of business long since and no one would know who "Britney Spears" is.)

Re:Utterly shocking

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm...along this reasoning, it may be that Windows is really telling the truth on it's linux myths pages. Afterall, they earn billions on Windows, so they must be be the best authority on judging OS.

Right?

Bullshit.

I've used Highwire, scholar and a couple of other (closed) systems to find relevant papers. The conclusion? I prefer google scholar.

The reason? Most of the stuff I find is easily accessible. It really annoys me when I (or my University) has no access to more then the abstracts journal X. In fact, usually I can find other relevant papers via scholar which I can access without subscription (or which we've subscribed to). Slightly OT: It's my believe that you will get more citations if you publish in the more open journals, so I always prefer that.

Second reason: google is fast and clean. You would not believe the horrible interfaces or some of the others. javascripts, java or even proprietary programs needed to access the databases. As for Highwire, it should be called Slowwire....

Of course, if scholar don't work I still try some of the others. But it is something I definately check and need nowadays.

A (very recent) PhD.

Thought:

[Gothic_Walrus]

Why focus on a niche search engine when you can put more effort into the one that is used by millions and is the public face of your company?

I didn't know Google Scholar existed until I downloaded the IE Toolbar and saw it as a search option. If I read a story about how Google is making their Scholar search engine better, chances are I'd be completely indifferent to it. I don't use it, so why should I care?

(That could change, since I start college in the fall. But I digress.)

Google's got their priorities, and the fact that they offer what they do for free is still pretty darn impressive. So what if it's not as good as the paid alternatives? It's free and it seems effective enough for the small market that's going to be using it...

It's one thing to have all the information

[winkydink]

It's entirely another to organize it in a way that is meaningful to those attempting to access it.

The beta argument doesn't wash with me. Virtually everything Google is doing today is beta. It's a cutesy way to hide behind any mistakes in a production service, because you can always say, "whoops! well, remember, it's only beta!"

Spreading the goodness too thin

[RealProgrammer]

Google is guilty of a bit of overconfidence, maybe, in expanding into areas they know little about, but I think Google Scholar is why there is a Google.

Google's founders were academics. Their focus is on creating ways to find information. Finding academic information ought to be their pet project.

The kicker is that if someone else does it better, Google will just buy them.

Astronomy

[v@mp]

I am a researcher in Astronomy and I have found that Google Schalor is very lacking in my field. They have bigger competition in Astronomy than in most fields because all of the journal articles in Astronomy going back a century have been scanned, cross referenced and are available from the NASA/Harvard Database.

They have a long way to go to compete with that.

Repository != Search Service

[Peter_Pork]

Google Scholar is not an attempt to replicate repositories like citeseer and the like. It is a specialized search service! If I search for a paper using Scholar, I get links from many different repositories, and from the web site of the authors. That's what this is all about. Furthermore, as a researcher, I always use plain Google or Google Scholar to locate papers, and I do have access to every other service. Google is just better at it than any other service. Do you know why? Because it gets the job done without any brain damage search language, without broken links and it searches the whole web, not just your random journal list. Can Google Scholar improve? Sure, but the article is pretty biased against a free (as in beer) service.

Also, there are other great free indexes out there that are not even mentioned in the article, like DBLP.

What's the big deal?

[Wee]

So the free (and relatively new) offering isn't as good as the pay services. So what? Most researchers have probably been using the pay services already (unless they only started doing their work 6 months ago, and even then their department likely has access to the subscription stuff), so now they can use the free Google service to supplement that. How can more information be bad?

That business about "otherwise very intelligent people have succumbed to stupidity by using Google Scholar to the exclusion of the other, much better services" sounds like the author has a personal or financial stake in WoS or Scopus. Or just a chip on his shoulder, axe to grind, whatever. Either way, the reviewer comes off sounding like an pompous asshole.

If you use Google Scholar and get what you need, then at least you didn't pay anything for the privilege. If they were charging money and it sucked, yeah, I could see someone whining about it. But for free?

-B

Re:beta

[DrEldarion]

I'm under the impression that everything they release will be in perpetual beta in order to be able to dodge any issues using that as an excuse.

Google = next IBM = Google University

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is on track to be the next IBM. That's right, extremely boring. Infact, it could be worse...maybe it will out-bore IBM and really turn into Google University. As far as I know, Google only has 2 half-decent services, search and gmail. Everything else is mostly crap, which creates some buzz initially and then everyone forgets about it, including Google itself. I'm sure google search is the best friend of online perverts. I mainly use it for browsing porn (google images...ah...can't wait for google video). Gmail is good because of AJAX. But I have clicked on an ad just ONCE in gmail, and I 've been using it for more than a year. Yep, Google is in a trade deficit with me.

At a career fair recently, google booth was visited by only about 5-10 people in a few hours. Microsoft booth must have had atleast 1000 people. Google mania is over.

Some kid in his garage can come out with the same services that Google is offering. That could be you ! There is no barrier on the internet...and Google would be obsolete by 2008.

This review is just stupid...

[quadshop]

Two reasons: a) The services to which they are comparing Google Scholar are extremely expensive. It is like comparing free TV to a movie you pay see in the theater, and getting all bent out of shape because TV has commercials and isn't in widescreen. Well, duh. b) The reviewer is obviously biased. This is not a review, it is marketing for the other services that are "superior" to Google Scholar. You can see this kind of stuff on pretty much any product site. But that other crap isn't on the front page of /. being touted as a "review".

TFA misses the point

[jeremymiles]

I use Google Scholar and Web of Science on a pretty regular basis - I'm not familiar with Scopus, so I can't comment on that. TFA doesn't mention Pubmed either, which is free.

It seems to me TFA has have missed the point of Google Scholar. Web of science does abstract, keyword and title searches. And it's very good at them. Google Scholar does full text searches. If I want to know if there has been a study on the effects of ibuprofen on slugs (or whatever), I go to WoS. However, sometimes you want something in the details, which isn't mentioned in the abstract or title. I sometimes want papers that have used a particular statistical technique - I'm not (very) interested in the substantive content, I just want a nice example. WoS - no use at all. Google Scholar - excellent.

When you get your results, WOS gives you the abstract. Google Scholar points you to the full text source - often you have to pay for it, but you have it there.

People who get obsessive about systematically reviewing the literature and making sure that they have accessed everything on the subject are never going to use Google Scholar. People who want to know more about a subject are better off with Google Scholar.

On citation searches, WoS wins hands down (IMHO).

Ummmm...

[Seoulstriker]

Or maybe it really is in beta?

Doing actual research! Re:Google's advantage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google advantage is not only that its free, but it finds PDF's on the net! When doing research, true research, not just padding citations on my paper, I can't afford $5 or $10 for every paper that looks like it *might* be interesting. The walled-off, high-priced services are nasty and unusable if you really need to blast into new territory with research. Sounds to me like there's a sour grapes syndrome here, as authors and publishers alike discover that if their articles aren't free, aren't on the web, then they don't get read and they don't get cited.

Its the interface, stupid

[paanta]

I've used most of the big academic search engines, and there's one area where google just blows everyone else away: the interface. No one else can hold a candle to the 'type some shit and get what you want back' google scholar search. Yeah, sure, it may be an 'incomplete' database, but what is there is VERY easy to find in my experience. When they've got more stuff indexed, this thing is going to rock. It's already the first place I turn when I need to pull up a citation, and I rarely have to go to one of the 'better' search engines.

Googlix?

[Sprotch]

As as lawyer having to rely on Lexis on Westlaw (expensive internet legal databases), I find their "search" engine a real pain. I can't imagine how it could be worse. If google would start a competitive database, they could win the whole market in a flash.

Re:Yes and yes.

[StringBlade]

Which search engines were those?

Last I checked, all the same search engines I used to use still exist: Altavista, Lycos, WebCrawler, Hotbot, Yahoo, AskJeeves. If you're talking about some obscure engine that doesn't exist anymore I hardly blame Google for that since they never made it out of obscurity.

Granted, Google is my (and most people's) primary search engine because it is most accurate most often and is very fast with lots of nice tools (site:, cache:, etc.).