A very nice presentation by UCLA showing why (fee) A&I products are superior (at least for time beeing) than (free) Google Scholar. via Distant Librarian
A very nice initiative by UCLA in educating their customers. Indeed all the A&I publishers should do a piece like this and make it available for the libraries.
"SMEALSearch is a niche search engine that searches the web and catalogs academic articles as well as commercially produced articles and reports that address any branch of Business."
Mary Ellen Bates article in econtent magazine summarizes nicely one of the short comings of Google, Google Scholar. It does not offer "clustering of search results, which helps conceptually narrow your search" IMO Yahoo also has the same problems when presenting search results. btw with their new yahoo mail search and dynamic clustering they might be in the right direction.
Glad to see that someone else in the industry is calling Google's results "dumb".
J Chromatogr A. 2005 Sep 2; 1085(2): 224-9
World view of this year's freshman at Beloit College via Stephen Abram
"Libraries have always been the best centers for computer technology and access to good software."
September issue of the magazine has their global corporate R&D Scorecard. Pharma and Biotech are leading the other sectors. Microsoft with $136,474 R&D spending per employee leads all the sectors except bio. Biogen leads R&D per employee with $161,196.
Full report available online too
Steve Rubel who is one of the bloggers that I like reading regularly thinks that
"It's very difficult to survive as a paid service in a Long Tail environment. One reason is that it's now easier to discover free, open source alternatives."I think he is missing the point.
As if RSS, XML, Web Feeds were not enough not Google introduced "Web Clips" with thei new Sidebar
via WallStreet Journal (subscription required)
"The free program, known as Sidebar, presents consumers with a pane of customized information -- such as weather forecasts, stock quotes, news headlines, text feeds from favorite Web sites, photo slideshows and email alerts -- that sits alongside whatever else the user is viewing. It provides some functions similar to Yahoo's popular MyYahoo customized Web-page service."
From an article in Library Journal
"Scholar is, of course, in its early days, and it is quite possible that these problems will be addressed. But when considering whether Scholar is a sufficient replacement for commercial indexing services, we should use the very same criteria for evaluation, such as the "Database Quality Criteria" from SCOUG. At the moment, such a comparison leaves Scholar wanting in some very significant ways."
Piggy Bank is an extension to the Firefox web browser that turns it into a “Semantic Web browser”, letting you make use of existing information on the Web in more useful and flexible ways.
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