The Search Principle blog

Google is seven (7) years old! Rumours are that Google will announce a huge increase in the number of sites it indexes (1000x times larger than when it opened in 1998) and a number of key partnerships. Meanwhile, Google scholar remains in beta one year after it was released.

Some say Google is too busy to worry about Scholar (meanwhile check out Google College) as it wants to challenge Microsoft with its Google-Sun partnership, and its plans for a completely separate Google Wireless Network.

For those that want to use Google’s advanced features, try Soople – easy expert search. It’s handy for those who want to fully exploit Google calculator for example.

Dean Giustini
UBC Google scholar blogger

1. Scirus-like search limit – Google Scholar has recently been testing various subject limits in Google Scholar. Have a look here.

Try “evidence based medicine” using the specific subject limit/category for “Medicine, Pharmacology, and Veterinary Science” and compare it to “Biology, Life Sciences, and Environmental Science”.

2. Google Blog Search – if you like to stay “up to the minute” with what’s happening on blogs, Google now has an advanced Blog search up and running.

Dean Giustini
UBC Google Scholar blog

My colleague Sally Taylor and I are offering an 1.5 hr workshop on “Getting the Most Out of Google”. Read more about the workshop and register here. You can also take a class on “Cited Reference Searching” – which will include Google Scholar – by taking the “Follow the Tracks” session.

You can also attend a course on becoming a “Sophisticated Web Searcher” through the Faculty of Arts. Read more here.

My librarian colleague Hilde Colenbrander points out that the UCLA Library is offering some tutorials, viewlets and other instructional materials (Camtasia) regarding Google Scholar. See the link here.

These instructional materials and the “ethos” conveyed are such that they seem to acknowledge Google scholar’s place among commercial tools such as PsycINFO. This is by no means common practice yet among academic libraries.

Dean Giustini
UBC Google Scholar blog

Google announced yet another new desktop application this week. Google Talk is the latest in instant messaging (IM) and VoIPing, a way for two or more people to talk for free using the Internet. Search watchers are buzzing about Google talk and predicting its impact on the future of telephone communication.

How will new Google software technologies affect the practice of medicine? For one, these technologies are inter-operable and compatible with PCs worldwide. In the “not-too-distant future”, doctors will be able to communicate via Google Talk to discuss cases. Imagine a pediatrician who diagnoses a child with Sandhoff disease, a rare disorder. She searches Google Scholar for articles and finds Sandhoff’s seminal article from 1968 which describes the disorder.

Could she speak to an expert like Dr. Sandhoff online via IM, now? Think about the power of bringing two clinicians together to share expertise freely for clinical decisions. Read more about Google Talk here Danny Sullivan’s “New Google Chat Offers Instant Messaging” August 24, 2005.

Dean Giustini
UBC Google Scholar blog

Health librarians teach new residents how to access and search for information in MEDLINE, and other commercial databases at this time of year. Yesterday, I gave a pre-test to twenty-five (25) pharmacy residents, asking if they knew about Google Scholar (84% said yes), used it (all used Mother Google, but fewer (68%) used Scholar regularly). In response to whether they knew the pros/cons of searching Google Scholar, 70% said no but wanted librarians to discuss this with them.

Though weak empirically, this was interesting news to me as it came on the heels of a study done at UC Libraries – Librarians Use of Google Scholar (August 2005). Bottom line: many librarians do not agree on whether to teach Google Scholar, or whether it’s useful at all. Read the many interesting comments in this document for the complete survey.

Dean Giustini
UBC Google Scholar Blog

Librarians in health (and, indeed, other areas) understand well that doing a literature review in an up-to-date database is critical in answering complex research questions. In health, this simple step is frequently a matter of life or death. (Think of Johns Hopkins’ debacle, and the poor lit review which caused the tragedy.)

In today’s Forbes magazine, there is an article (not always accurate but I take his main point) geared toward public library users entitled “Google Isn’t Everything” by Stephen Manes. The article uses a few effective examples to show that a local library’s licensed databases often provide more reliable proof or “evidence” than the open web does. And this includes Google Scholar.

Academic librarians have a real challenge ahead to get this kind of message out to our die-hard Google users. The challenge is showing users how to use Google in certain contexts, and not in others.

Dean Giustini
UBC Google Scholar blog

Two relevant updates for Google watchers:

1. Regular Google results at the top – Watch for links to Google Scholar

Regular (or, vanilla Google as some are calling it) is starting to experiment by displaying relevant search-oriented results leading users to Google Scholar. Here is an example of searching for “research grants”. This is irreproducible (mostly) though I did find this example.

2. Scirus goes head to head with GS by indexing more institutional content like DSPACE at UofT

Have a look at Scirus these days. By searching web content only, you can reproduce results found in Google Scholar by doing targeted searching for items in institutional repositories, such as UofT’s DSPACE. Have a look at the article here.

The JAKE (Jointly Administered Knowledge Environment) Project http://jake.med.yale.edu was started several years ago as a source of bibliographic information about journals, particularly electronic versions of journals. Unfortunately, many of the mirror sites found on Google demonstrate that JAKE is now severely out of date, and terribly slow (it generally was). New resources are starting to appear.

One such tool is Genamics – JournalSeek. The search tool includes a) a title search or b) ISSN or eISSN if the regular Google tools fail to help you find what you need.

Dean Giustini
UBC Google Scholar Blog

“Place more paid subscription & deep-web content where end-users like to search – ie. on Google”.

Last week, the blogs were ripe with speculation that Google has been beta-testing a premium service to open paid/subscription content to the masses. Whether this will reside on Google or Google Scholar is not known. Which subscription based databases could this be, one wonders? Lexis-Nexis? EBSCO products? OVID?

The other issue is how will users obtain full-text content? Some suggest Google will compete with PayPal through its “Wallet” initiative (which also
ties in with publishers’ demands, the Google Library “pay as you go” plan for copyrighted books, insiders say).

1. Google Indexes Subscription Content – eWeek.com

2. Google Plans to Launch e-Wallet

Dean Giustini
UBC Google Scholar blogger