Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “Google is an unusual because it’s really organized from the bottom up. … It often feels at Google people are pretty much doing what think best and they tolerate having us around. … We don’t really have a five-year plan. … We really focus on what’s new, what’s exciting and how can you win quickly with your new idea." via Financial Geek
"As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future." Robert Darnton's essay "The Library in the New Age" for the New York Review of Books.
If you really want to enjoy and have fun with what you are doing and and make genuine contributions to the science and health communities join Elsevier E&T Group. In our product group we are looking for two special people to create and market online information products. (Yes, they should be better than what Google is offering to corporate R&D market.)
One thing that I can guarantee with these positions is that they are for a very exciting product line. Here are links to the job postings Product Manager & Marketing Manager
If you know anyone who might fit these positions, please let me know or if you are interested just apply for the positions.
Now some major publishers are thinking how and if Google Knol will disintermediate publishing. Here is John Blossom's insights on Knol.
It's too early to say how this will work. The success of this may depend on community and collaboration feature that Knol will use. A young scientist who is knowledgeable on Automatically Precise Manufacturing (APM) may choose to create a topic page on APM and expose his knowledge. Or Google may choose to leverage the expert names that they have in Google Scholar and encourage authors to write topic pages? Who knows? One thing that I know is this kind of moves by Google makes our job more interesting and challenging.
Dean Giustini highlights 5 problems with Google Scholar after being in beta for three years. I think Anurag Acharya and his team of few engineers at Google Scholar have created more than a "good enough" product for a free service. Can Google team do better? Sure. Will they improve the product? I don't have a clue. So far it seems that Google Scholar is not a priority for Google as their Renewable Energy initiatives
Some hype and questions about Google's Open Social. Will be interesting to see if Nature Network will join this initiative? or will there be a new comer who will suck all the profile information from these social networks and create a new scientific network?
My colleagues know well my response to this kind of studies which shows the logical. One of the key results of the study -Free Web Search vs. Paid Search Tools- is that "researchers believe that as a search tool for technical information paid search is 325% more productive than the free web". You can download the white paper here or request the full study that was conducted independently by Martin Akel & Associates by emailing eicsutomersupport{at}elsevier{dot}com.
The second annual Sci Foo conference will be held in Googleplex on August 3-5. Again this is an invitation only conference and last year's was very well received by the attendants.
If you ask what's the agenda?
"There is no predefined agenda, instead attendees collaboratively create one during the first evening of the event, having shared ideas in advance through a wiki". via Nature
That's definetely a very valuable event and if you want to follow Scifoo check technorati; connotea, or lexical or bbgm
The question that I had last year is still valid: Are there any other publishers who were invited for the conference ( camp)?
There were few postings here, here last week about Hakia. I am all for a new search engine (especially started and funded by Turks ) that will provide us better answers to our questions.
Riza Berkan who is the CEO of Hakia invites public to send good questions. I don't if the following is a good one by his criteria but here we go:
What is technology intelligence?
The results that I am getting now from Hakia are not giving me the answer. The first result is related to the Privacy issues after 9/11. The same question in Google brings more relevant results including Alan Porter's article on QTIP
That's a challenging and intriguing road ahead in getting the meaning of the questions and providing the right answers...
Btw my search "Who is Elsevier's competitor" resulted in the following result:
You are very curious today 
Although Reed Elsevier is a competitor, it can not be included at a threat to Thomson. See this page. which created a nice smile in my face.
I hope in the future, Hakia using their semantic web technologies, would be able to provide a full list of our competitors and not just the search results similar to Google where I can't get any insights..
A paper "Random Walks on the Click Graph" by Nick Craswell, and Martin Szummer both from Microsoft Research will be presented SIGIR 2007.
“We are trying to find,” Craswell explains, “a high-quality set of synonymous queries and results. Because our work is based on a large set of user click data, we’re getting a handle on user intent. Whereas click data can only go from a precise query to a set of documents, we find larger clusters of related queries and information.”
Click data, on which the project relies, provides the means to analyze the results for a particular query. The engine devised by Craswell and Szummer considers the history of all the people who ever typed that query and the preference of those users according to which results were often clicked. The history of which results were selected for which queries is click data.
“Click-based methods,” Craswell notes, “are a very good way of understanding the dominant intent.”
In doing so, the researchers are able to take a look at queries that are synonymous, but “synonymous queries,” as it turns out, are not quite what you might expect.
“Interestingly,” Craswell says, “the definition of what’s a synonymous query is different from synonyms you would find in a thesaurus. It’s very specific to search and depends on understanding user intent.” via Microsoft Research
Prof. Anne-Wil Harzing has a very interesting article titled "Reflections of Google Scholar" comparing Google Scholar and Web of Science for citation analysis.
"If an academic shows good citation metrics, it is very likely that he or she has made a significant impact on the field. However, the reverse is not necessarily true. If an academic shows weak citation metrics, this may be caused a lack of impact on the field. However, it may also be caused by working in a small field, publishing in a language other than English (LOTE), or publishing mainly (in) books."Harzing has also developped a software called "Publish or Perish" using Google Scholar content where the program provides analysis of citations including total number of citations, average number of citations per paper, average number of citations per author, average number of papers per author, average number of citations per year.
Peter Brantley got the insight from my colleague Ale deVries and posted about our initiative of integrating Elsevier's journals in Google. That's a very logical and correct move on our part.
I do want to kill Google but improve the results that we get there. Do we really want to search? No, we want to find answers to our questions and get out or do some discovery "berry picking" while finding the answers. There has been a lot coverage lately about Powerset
and their PowerLab and how they may change the information retrieval.
Pinhead's Progress: Powerset and Powerlabs, roundupvia Nitin Karandikar
Kevin Burton's NEW FeedBlog: Powerset - Out of Stealth
Matt Labbe's whirn: Powerset Opens Up
Ashkan Karbasfrooshan on HipMojo: Right Now, PoweRset Stands For PR
Science Foo which is organized by Nature, Google and O'Reilly is having their second reunion in August via Jean Claude Bradley
Related search is a good concept but suggesting mail order marijuana as a related search for MOM
that's a bit far fetch....
"The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has joined with Google in an unprecedented online mapping initiative. Crisis in Darfur enables more than 200 million Google Earth users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur, Sudan. The Museum has assembled content photographs, data, and eyewitness testimony from a number of sources that are brought together for the first time in Google Earth." via USHHM
"Educating today's generation about the atrocities of the past and present can be enhanced by technologies such as Google Earth. When it comes to responding to genocide, the world's record is terrible. We hope this important initiative with Google will make it that much harder for the world to ignore those who need us the most." Sara J. Bloomfield, Director, USHMM
DBpedia has great examples of how search should answer real questions like show me the names of soccer players with shirt number 11 from clubs which have stadiums that hold more than 40,000 seats and born in a country with more than 10 million population. DBPedia gets the content from Wikipedia and is using semantic web technologies. The solution is a collaboration of Universitat Leipzig, Open Link Software and Freie Univesitat Berlin. You can also easily modify the queries. Once the search syntaxes are are simplified there is a great potential for this type of technologies. You'll get an answer to your questions!
Times has a story about Reed Elsevier and our CEO Sir Crispin Davis. The writer got it right when s/he states where we are moving in our business units:
"The unlovely jargon for this is “workflow solutions”. " The workflow revolution is set to turn Reed Elsevier into more of a software and services company".I strongly believe that authoritative content plus software and services which will solve customers' business questions will be key for our success. Just being an information provider will not fly any more.
I was reading Adam Bosworth post on "How you know you are getting the best care" and after reading the following section:
"How do I know if the information is trustworthy and reliable?I could not stop thinking about a children book called "MRS ARMITAGE on Wheels", where her bike was having problems and everytime she had a problem she was asking to her dog Breakspear "What this bikes needs". What Google needs is trusted content sources of the scientific publishers, this can be one way to improve the trustworthiness and reliability of the information. On top of that they have to develop something better than what Microsoft has with MedStory
There is a lot of material out there about drugs, diseases, procedures and treatments. How do you know what is trustworthy and what isn’t? Search is great at finding us places with relevant information, but it is hard to know which links are reliable and which are less so."
Posts
All Comments
