Google spanks everyone else on robustness and responsiveness
Honestly, if we compare Google to Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Meta, isn't Google the least evil one?
I literally get only 1-3 real spam mails per month without any filter.
Like you can ask to find a restaurant and it won't point you to the closer one but to one that is few km away instead.
- Google Search
- YouTube (more debateable, but I think it's a marvel)
- Google Books
- ChromeBooks
- Android
- Google Calendar
- Google Earth
- Google Drive
- Google Docs
- Waze
- Android Auto
- Google Pay
- Kubernetes
- Go
- VP8 / VP9
I'd rather take all those products than leave them.
My conclusion is that any such system needs to be "complete" or almost complete to be useful. By system, I mean a service or some handcrafted system where I could track anything. In all fairness, Sci-Hub partially fits the bill here and it's a big plus to society.
But the point is Google Scholar is complete in the sense that with a high probability I will find any paper I'm looking for along with reliable metadata. That's great, but the fact that they go above and beyond to prevent sharing that data is IMO backwards, against all academic research principles and this should raise questions within the research communities that rely on it.
It can take 1-2 weeks to go away and be able to use it. There's no way to get in contact with anyone. Tried the Chrome extension email, support forums.
It's a good reality check. There's no real support behind it and it can go away just like Google Reader did.
I think the motivations behind it are laudable, but they should not be the answer to the actual problem.
The Google of today is far more boring and less helpful.
Google has a decent job not turning fully into an Oracle for example.
In most universities here in New Zealand, articles have to be published in a journal indexed by Elsevier's Scopus. Not in a Scopus-indexed journal, it does not count anymore than a reddit comment. This gives Elsevier tremendous power. But in CS/ML/AI most academics and students turn to Google Scholar first when doing searches.
A simple way to make a step away from encouraging bibliometrics (which would be a step in the right direction) would be to list publications by date (most recent first) on authors pages rather than by citations count, or at least to let either users and/or authors choose the default sorting they want to use (when visiting a page for users, for their page by default for authors).
Bibliometrics, in use for over 150 years now, is not a game. That's like arguing there is no value in the PageRank algorithm, and no validity to trying to find out which journals or researchers or research teams publish better content using evidence to do so.
> which benefits the big publishers
Ignoring that it helps small researchers seems short sighted.
> A simple way to make a step ... would be to list publications by date
It's really that hard to click "year" and have that sorted?
It's almost a certainty when someone is looking for a scholar, they are looking for more highly cited work than not, so the default is probably the best use of reader times. I absolutely know when I look up an author, I am interested in what other work they did that is highly regarded more than any other factor. Once in a while I look to see what they did recently, which is exactly one click away.
But Google remains focused on popularity because that is optimal for advertising, where large audiences are the only ones that matter and there is this insidious competition for top ranking (no expectation that anyone would ever want to dig deep into search results). That sort of focus is not ideal for non-commercial research, IMHO.
Having pretty wide journal access through my institution means I don’t need to reach out to sci-hub.
(the above is a joke comparing old school library work to search engines circa 2000; I didn't actually do all those steps. I'd usually just find the most recent review article and read the papers it cited).
I actually respect this style a lot. There is a firehose of papers coming onto google scholar each day. You type in some keyword you get 500 hits. This cut that down substantially for him in a way where he never missed anything big (reading nature and science), kept up with what the field has been doing (reading the more niche specific journals and keeping up with the labs who put out this niche work), and seeing what was coming up in the pipeline from the conferences or what sort of research new grants were requesting. I'm not sure that scholar would have helped much.
Unironically the plot of MGS5 the Phantom Pain literally happened IRL. Skullface would be proud!
they remembered google scholar exists
it's a great product and I don't trust google at all not to break it or mess with it
AFAICT Scholar remains because Anurag built up massive cred in the early years (he was a critically important search engineer) with Larry Page and kept his infra costs and headcount really small, while also taking advantage of search infra).
22. Switching on sort by date will impose a filter to papers published within the year, and you cannot do anything about that.
!!! And here I thought it's been broken for years, and a sign of decay due to lack of internal support.
Has he still been working on it in the 10 years since this article? His name is in the byline of the new blog post, but it's not clear from that how much he's been working on it.
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'Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He' by J. H. Hetherington and F. D. C. Willard [0, 1, 2]
[0] https://xkeys.com/media/wysiwyg/smartwave/porto/category/abo...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Geim
[1] https://repository.ubn.ru.nl//bitstream/handle/2066/249681/2...
The friction is tremendously higher than on-demand downloadable options: LibGen, SciHub, ZLibrary, Anna's Archive, or even sources such as ArXiv, SocArXiv, SSRN, which are far more fragmentary and limited.
is this a nod to pg’s delve blowup on twitter?
Btw, Anurag's last name is misspelt under the picture. It reads "Achurya" instead of "Acharya"
Edit: They fixed it
More on Chester and his co-author status: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard
I do not want to comment on number 20. I really wished that I joined CERN 10 years earlier but then it is the mistake of my parents :)
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/google-scholar-pdf-...
Interestingly, it highlighted the words as it read. I haven't seen that before online. Not sure how useful it is (especially for anyone interested in this particular topic), but I thought it was a neat innovation nevertheless.
Another interesting thing is little popup form at the end of post asking me if my opinion of Google changed for the better after reading the post. I mean maybe a bit, b the form definitely knocked the score back down.
https://youtu.be/DZ2Bgwyx3nU?t=315
I recommend you watch the rest of the video, on the subject of open/closed and enclosure of infrastructure.
My guess for a while has been that it was back to two of them! if that!
