Google Scholar is down

December 22, 2007

According to a posting at TechCrunch, Google Scholar was down ~32% in 2007. Many of us use Google Scholar to find publications, but as a life scientist, my first stop continues to remain PubMed. I suspect that people in other sciences have their own favorite sources. To be successful, Scholar needs to be different and move beyond it’s current rather dry interface. Some time ago, I had proposed a Plus Box for Google Scholar. IMO to be really successful, Google has to go beyond just peer reviewed literature. I have been unable to get in touch with the Scholar folks, so if anyone who has access can make some suggestions to them, it would be much appreciated.

I am including a poll. If you could rationalize your vote in the comments it would be much appreciated.



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Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Science, Search 

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    Hey Deepak,

    You might be able to get in touch with some of the developers from the Google Scholar group. One more thing I think Google scholar needs is the ability to sort results based on # of citations. That would be very simple to implement, but so far they have yet to include it.
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    The problem with Google Scholar, as I told them when it came out, is that it needs to know how to handle names in the form Firstname M. Lastname, F.M. Lastname, and Lastname, F.M.

    A search for Lastname, F. should return results for Frank Lastname and Frederick Lastname and everybody else with an F starting their first name. Likewise, a search for Firstname Lastname should return results for F. Lastname.

    Currently, it can't do this because it doesn't have a operator for firstname or lastname or initials, only for name. This makes it all but useless for academic purposes, where authorship is a major search criteria. The only time I actually use it is when I'm using a index, like ISI "Walled Garden" of Knowledge which doesn't have links to pubmed, display DOIs, or give any other links to non-ISI content. The shortest path to the pubmed entry is sometimes to select the article title and do a right-click google search.

    /happy new year
    //hope you had a good holiday season
 

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