The search engine giant Google Inc. (www.google.com) announced on November 18 the launch of a new service, http://scholar.google.com, which draws upon newly developed algorithms to list the academic research that appears to be most relevant to a search request, thus making better sense of all the scholarly work stored on the Web. Google doesn't plan to charge for the service nor use the feature to deliver text-based ads — the primary source of its profits.
Anurag Acharya, a Google engineer who helped develop the new search tools, said that Google has benefited a lot from scholarly research, and that this is one way Google is giving back to the scholarly community.
Although Google already had been indexing the reams of academic research online, the company hadn't been able to separate the scholarly content from commercial Web sites. By focusing on the citations contained in academic papers, Google also engineered its new system to provide a list of potentially helpful material available at libraries and other offline sources.
The scholarly search effort continues Google's effort to probe even deeper into content available online and offline. Last month, Google expanded a program that invites publishers to scan their books into the search engine's index, enabling people to peek at the contents online before deciding whether to buy a copy.
