[Bridging_the_digital_divide] New Google Search engine

[Jason Barkeloo]

New search service creates 'Google for scholars'
  By Cara Branigan, Associate Editor, eSchool News
  June 3, 2004

Internet searches might become faster and more fruitful for students, 
scholars, and other academics as early as this year, thanks to a pilot 
program being developed as a free service spearheaded by Google, the 
world's leading internet search engine.

  The initiative, called CrossRef Search, combines Google's popular 
search technology with the archives of up to 300 leading scholarly 
publications, allowing researchers to separate Google's typical search 
results from high-quality, peer-reviewed, scholarly content.

  "Everybody is using Google, even scientists," said Ed Pentz, executive 
director of CrossRef, an association for scholarly publishers. "For a 
lot of people, Google is the first place they check."

  Google's general search results can produce an overwhelming amount of 
links, many of which are unreliable or unrelated to the desired topic. 
If a science student types "Dolly" into a Google query, for example, he 
or she will spend valuable time sorting through disparate links about 
the singer Dolly Parton and the musical Hello Dolly before finding 
information about the first cloned sheep. Using the terms "Dolly" and 
"sheep" narrows the search to a still-overwhelming 116,000 links.

  The CrossRef Search, however, would provide access to full-text 
articles about Dolly the cloned sheep only from trusted sources, Pentz 
said.

  The service aims to help students find authoritative, scientific 
information faster. "There's so much information and so much being 
indexed by search engines like Google," Pentz said, but "students 
[often] don't look at the quality of the search results."

  Nine publishers--the American Physical Society, Annual Reviews, the 
Association for Computing Machinery, Blackwell Publishing, the 
Institute of Physics Publishing, the International Union of 
Crystallography, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, and 
John Wiley & Sons Inc.--have made their archives available for the 
pilot so far.

  Using the tool, which is located on each participating publisher's 
search page, students can search the current and past issues of 
multiple journals, as well as conference proceeding articles. The 
CrossRef Search performs like a typical Google search, except that it 
searches only the participating publishers' archives.

  More than 3,000 searches have been done since CrossRef Search launched 
April 28. To refine the search process, CrossRef will gather feedback 
from those who have used it over the next several months.

  Once the pilot is complete in December, CrossRef expects to make the 
search tool available to the general public. At that time, school 
libraries could add the CrossRef Search box, which includes a Google 
logo, to their web page for students to use.

  In the meantime, CrossRef plans to add 20 more publishers to the 
pilot. Ultimately, the group hopes to add all of its 300 members' 
publications.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryts.cfm?ArticleID=5097


---

Jason Barkeloo
President
TouchSmart Publishing
http://www.touchsmart.net
tele 513.225.8765


This electronic mail (email) communication, and any files transmitted 
with it, are confidential, and intended solely for the indicated 
recipient(s). Any review, use, or distribution by anyone other than the 
intended recipient(s) is strictly prohibited. If you have received this 
e-mail in error, or are not the
intended recipient, please notify the sender, and delete all copies
immediately.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 3724 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/bridging_the_divide/attachments/20040603/a617cbd2/attachment-0001.bin