Google Scholar and findability

In his presentation, Dean Giustini from University of British Columbia is calling libraries to work with Google Scholar.

In slide 8 Dean lists that "Fast, easy to use, easy to navigate" as a plus for Google Scholar. May be Dean and I look at the navigation from a different perspective, but I differ on the ease of navigation for Google Scholar. I think there is no navigation in Google Scholar, just a listing of a bunch of records which I call "dumb records". When Google Scholar team starts doing clustering and faceted searching with their search results, then I'll be able to navigate easily. Right now I am just getting records with no intelligence and no taxonomy which can help me in findability.

Dean finishes his presentation by a quote from John Regazzi who is the visionary of the Engineering Village concept when he launched it in 1995 and now the Dean of College of Information and Computer Science at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University.

"There is no guarantee that the "free" search engines of today will be free in the future, but the shift [to free] is significant...as is illustrated by the mindshare gains made by search engines" full article

via William Walsh