DOCID: 4046925
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Also new for 2006 was a related search option: "For every Google Scholar search result, we try to automatically determine which articles in our repository are most closely related to it. You can see a list of these articles by clicking the 'Related Articles' link that appears next to each result. The list of related articles is ranked primarily by how similar these articles are to the original result, but also takes into account the relevance of each paper."[1]
Péter Jacsó has called Google Scholar's quality into question in his excellent and thorough analysis of Google Scholar's citation ability. Jacsó, Professor of Library and Information Science, University of Hawaii, concluded that "Google Scholar (GS) does a really horrible job matching cited and citing references."[2] There are numerous other scholarly citation search options (CiteSeer, ISI Highly Cited, and Scirus) that, for now at least, are superior to Google Scholar.
However, I would not count Google Scholar out in the long run. Google Scholar is yet another example of what are called "vertical search engines," that is, search services that focus on indexing and searching specialized data sources. Vertical search has fundamentally. replaced the portal concept as a more targeted, less manpower-intensive, and more cost effective means of getting the right information to the right people at the right time.
Google Trends
Google unveiled Google Trends in May 2006 and set a lot of people thinking about its potential utility. Google Trends is a new technology that lets users see how many searches have been performed on one to five terms and where those searches originate.
"Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results–our search-volume graph–plotted on a linear scale.
- ↑ Luiz Barroso, Distinguished Engineer, "Exploring the scholarly neighborhood," Google Blogspot, 22 August 2006, <http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/exploring-scholarly-neighborhood.html> (10 October 2006).
- ↑ Péter Jacsó, "Google Scholar and The Scientist," Péter Jacsó's Review Extras, October 2005, <http://www2.hawaii.edu/~jacso/extra/gs/> (31 October 2006).
