Here is a tidbit on the steadily improving Google Scholar from this week’s Nature special section on web techologies, blogs, and science: It has just two full-time staff, plus leader Anurag Acharya.
How many people do you think Elsevier and Thomson are throwing at their respective scientific search engines? A lot more, would be my guess, making Google Scholar feel fairly disruptive to me — especially given how the aforementioned companies try to position Google’s entry as a useless playtoy.
Granted, they don’t have Google itself to crib from, like the Google Scholars folks, but that’s the point, isn’t it? Incumbents are having to build a whole business around something that is merely a useful adjunct for Google.
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