A c t i o n f o r L i b r a r i e s — J a n u a r y 2 0 0 5

The Internet Connection

By Michael Sauers
Two New Offerings from Google
In the past two months Google has announced two new initiatives that should be of interest to librarians, Google Scholar and Google Suggest. Both are currently in beta testing.

Google Scholar (scholar.google.com/): According to Google, "Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. You can use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the Web."

Google has created a subset of its main index that focuses on material it considers "scholarly." In the sample search for dean koontz, the first page of results (see www.bcr.org/publications/afl/2005/january/graphics/google-a.gif) included four books, one biography and one of criticism and two of his works of fiction. (I'm guessing that Google ranked the nonfiction items first since theoretically someone using Google Scholar would be researching Mr. Koontz, not necessarily looking to read his fiction.) The remaining search results were from reputable organizations/institutions associated with literature - National Council of Teachers of English, American Library Association and Virginia Tech Library.

An additional feature is that when books are found, there are links to the Open WorldCat project, allowing searchers to enter their zip codes to see if libraries in the area have the book in their collection.

Google Suggest (www.google.com/webhp?complete=1): Google Suggest works similarly to auto- complete, a feature in most of today's Web browsers. If auto-complete is turned on in a browser, when you start typing in a form field, the browser automatically presents you with text that you have previously typed into that field.

In Google's version, when you start typing, a dropdown list appears suggesting to you searches that have been done in Google based upon what you've already typed. Additionally, the approximate number of results you'll receive for each suggested search are presented.

In this example, (see www.bcr.org/publications/afl/2005/january/graphics/google-b.gif), I started by typing dean k, and Google filled in the rest of the search box with dean koontz and presented me with a list of possible other searches to perform. As I continue to type, the list of suggested searches changes appropriately. If I wish to select one of the suggested searches, I can do so by using either the up and down arrow keys or my mouse.

At this time Google Suggest only works in English. There are plans to support additional languages, but no time frame has been given.

Next Article | Previous Article | Table of Contents | BCR Publications