

Ask HN: Google Goes Popular? - bertm

Lately, I have noticed when I am doing a scientific search on Google,maybe an algorithm, resent research paper etc., I get less scientific sources than I normally would and more what I would consider "popular" sources. Has anyone else noticed this? Let's face it Google is pretty much my lens into the world. I am not near a major university library, so I do not have much choice.<p>I do not like this "pressure" to fit into Google's popular mold. Does anyone else have a better search engine for meaningful sources. I'm not saying Wikipedia, About, or Ehow are not creditable sources... hmm... yes yes, I am saying that. Any Help? Maybe something that indexes noncommercial sites only...
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sounddust
Are you using Google Scholar for this research? <http://scholar.google.com/>

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runn1ng
sadly, Google Scholar mostly gives me a lot of articles... that are all behind
a paywall.

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araneae
You should e-mail the corresponding author and ask them to send you a .pdf. It
helps if you claim to be at a university from a poor, developing country and
your library doesn't have any subscriptions. Some authors will also have the
.pdf uploaded on their website.

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robg
Upvote, but not for the suggestion to lie.

It's a terribly inefficient system and all government grants should require
any resulting publication be openly accessible. But until we get there, simply
look for their website or send them a nice, short email with the publication
in the subject line. If there are multiple authors, you could have more
success with a middle author than the leading or trailing authors (first and
last are often the lab head). An alternative is looking for an administrative
contact on their website.

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byrneseyeview
Add filetype:pdf to your query.

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tbgvi
Agreed, advanced search is your friend when looking for solid research. In
addition to looking for pdf's I often get better results filtering by .edu
sites as well.

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imurray
That will miss many non-US institutions. For example, UK universities use
.ac.uk

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benwr
If you want to include them, boolean logic still works for advanced search
tags. You can search for 'somethingorother site:.edu OR site:.ac.uk'

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vitobcn
When I was a student I used CiteSeer all the time, but I guess it depends on
the area of your research.

<http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/>

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wooster
Google search has been almost useless for me since they dropped implicit AND
for implicit OR.

As in, the query [random trie] is now (random OR trie). The query [+random
+trie] returns much better results (random AND trie).

I've seriously been considering starting a search engine just to get back to a
~2002 era Google level of usability.

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julio_the_squid
I agree, plus their word mangling/assumptions are out of control. I often have
to use double quotes to make it clear that yes, what I typed in is what I'm
searching for.

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litewulf
I'm kind of curious: hypothetically imagine Google had super crazy search
personalization... and knew when you were interested in scientific sources in
a field versus just the wikipedia article. Would you be happier because your
searches are great, or freaked out because you feel your privacy is being
invaded.

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icey
I wonder if this might have something to do with it:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1082209>

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olalonde
Wikipedia is noncommercial.

