Stand on the Shoulders of… Patent Lawyers?
A colleague tipped me on this: Google Scholar is now showing patent results. An example: Result 9 for [video compression].
I'm of two minds about this. Sure it's not true to the 'scholarly' spirit of their "Stand on the shoulders of giants" search they developed, but it may be kind of useful to have both databases searchable in one interface (just don't believe it's scholarly). On the other hand, I see this as yet another attempt by G to force upon us a half-baked service that is very inferior to everything else out there. I already had my rant in this Cre8 thread, and I think it's still fairly accurate.
To follow on: is this the web equivalent of 'bundling' that got Microsoft into so much trouble in the 1990's? Any lawyers out there? Pinging Bill!
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April 26th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
I noticed this back in December, so they’ve been doing it for a while.
There’s a nice interview with Anurag Acharya, lead engineer for Google Scholar, where he makes this statement:
There are plenty of scholarly works that were never revealed in academic papers. The works of Edison, for instance, are much richer when you look at the patents.
Broder’s search engine patent are great sources of information about how search engines work. I’d guess that a good percentage of patent filings probably shouldn’t be considered scholarly, but a good number of them are.
As for Google Scholar, I’d love to be able to easily selectively filter out the patents, the books, and the paid sites that only show an abstract, and expect to be paid to allow you access to the work indexed.
Not sure if the concept of bundling really applies here. You mean the practice of including free programs with an operating system so that the paid versions from other companies weren’t as convenient, and were more likely not to be purchased. Most of the patent information is free from the patent office.
April 26th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Thanks for the very informative response Bill! Very helpful. As someone who’s spent a sizeable chunk of his life simply chasing down academic papers, I appreciate efforts to make them more accessible. However, adding (for example) patent results without an obvious way to not include them is not that great. I would love to have an advanced search functionality that asks you to specify which databases you’d like to search. That could include freely accessible journals, free-abstract-only journals, somewhat specialized journals (e.g., the Economist, or say, Oil and Gas Journal), patents, etc.
As for bundling, maybe that’s the wrong word for it, but it’s the idea of integrating two pieces of software without the option not to have one of them without the other. To approach this from another angle: is Google leveraging its (very) strong position in the general search market to dominate specialized search markets such as patents and academic journals?
Thanks again for your post. Very informative!
Pierre
April 28th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
You’re welcome.
I agree on the value of filtering results. It might be interesting to perform the search, and be shown a list of sources with numbers of results associated with those sources, and be able to filter at that point (though I see a value in being able to filter first, too).
I suspect that people would use specialized search engines along with Google’s search rather than only using Google’s search. I’ve noticed some statements within the medical community that researchers have said that they like being able to use Google for supplemental searches to enhance their results, but that they wouldn’t rely upon it solely. I think that’s probably the right approach for other disciplines, too.