Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Alan MacHett" <machett AT ibiblio.org>]

My long-standing disdain for Google might come to an end, assuming they
don't fuck this up:  http://scholar.google.com/

My second search (in which I used quotation marks, unlike the first
search) produced absolutely no fluff, crap, or ads for the first 10 pages.
 Page 11 still looked good, but there was an item or two just slightly
off-topic.  (Note: The first search, without the quotation marks, began to
produce crap after the first 5 links.)

-Alan

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/latimests/20041227/ts_latimes/googledesignsanengineforeggheads
>
> Google Scholar relies on the same index of websites as Google's
> mainstream search engine but ranks those websites differently.
>
> The regular search engine uses a system called PageRank, which
> turns the Internet into a huge popularity contest. When a user
> enters a query into Google, Web pages are ranked in large part
> according to the number of times they are linked to by other
> websites.
>
> That approach presents problems when it comes to specialized
> research, because the most relevant papers may not be the most
> popular. Studies that would be useful to scientists may live in
> obscurity on the Web, buried beneath hundreds of sites that
> command more links.
>
> So Google Scholar doesn't rely on how many websites link to a
> particular paper or book. Instead, it examines who wrote it, who
> published it and how many other scholarly works cited it. Based
> on those sorts of criteria, dissertations, peer-reviewed papers
> and other scholarly literature can float to the top of search
> results.
>
> The newest Google search engine has received mixed reviews.
> Branton and others complain that, unlike nearly all other
> scholarly databases, Google won't disclose what sources it draws
> from, so academics can't know what they're missing.
>
> It also appears to be incomplete. In an online review, Peter Jacso
> of the University of Hawaii at Manoa's library and information
> science program wrote that a search for all records from the
> medical research database PubMed returned only 879,000. The
> database actually contains 15 million records.
>
> "Like its popular counterpart, searching Google Scholar is easy,"
> he wrote. "Finding the gems is difficult."
>