untangling_the_web

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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.'?'
Peter Jacs6 has called Google Scholar's quality into question in his excellent and
thorough analysis of Google Scholar's citation ability. Jacs6, Professor of Library
and Information Science, University of Hawaii, concluded that "Google Scholar (GS)
does a really horrible job matching cited and citing references.,,42 There are
numerous other scholarly citation search options (CiteSeer, lSI 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 Scholar
http://scholar.google.com/
Advanced Google Scholar Search
http://scholar.google.com/advanced scholar search
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.
41 Luiz Barroso, Distinguished Engineer, "Exploring the scholarly neighborhood," Google Blogspot,
22 August 2006,
(10 October 2006).
42 Peter Jacs6, "Google Scholar and The Scientist," Peter Jacs6's Review Extras, October 2005,
(31 October 2006).
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