

'We present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine' - ccarpenterg
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TYT-3WRC342-2N&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=f868f1b89cd1a15b056abecaadcf7fb4

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robotrout
This paper is an academic paper, which, in our current system, means that to
read it, we have to pay for it.

I would venture to say that all of our institutions of higher learning receive
federal and state money. Each of them, as well, has an active program in place
to seek out charitable contributions from alumni and other likely victims.
"Help us teach the world", they tell us, as their hand reaches out for our
checkbook.

There is a tradition in science of collaboration between institutions. Even
countries that have political tension between them embrace, or at least
succumb to, the notion of the importance of this collaboration.

Yet here we are, being asked to buy an 11 year old paper. Indeed, there's
hardly an interesting paper written by anybody in academia that is easily
available. Sure, you may be able to hunt it down, or go to the authors
website, or pirate a copy. Why is this necessary? Why is this information sold
to the world in small, hard to search doses, rather than being made freely
available? Can you imagine the disservice done to mankind by this silly
practice? How many inventions have not been invented? How many discoveries
have not been made? This is not a drug company that's invested billions in
R&D, and so deserves the fruits of it's labor. This is work by our young PhD
students, funded using tax and charity money, in fields that claim to place a
high value on the free exchange of knowledge, and we're still buying 11 year
old academic papers.

I want academic papers to be free and available and searchable. I've already
paid for them.

~~~
brfox
These days, if you get NIH funding, then any publications have to be freely
available within 12 months of publication:

<http://publicaccess.nih.gov/>

It doesn't take care of these older studies, or work done without NIH
funding... but its a step.

And, scholar.google.com is as good of a free, full text search tool as there
is. Most journal sites give the googlebot open access to index their content,
so it is a great way to find things instead of pubmed, which only searches
abstracts.

~~~
RK
_And, scholar.google.com is as good of a free, full text search tool as there
is. Most journal sites give the googlebot open access to index their content,
so it is a great way to find things instead of pubmed, which only searches
abstracts._

That's called web spamming or spamdexing via cloaking. I find it incredibly
frustrating because they point you to what you want, but then you're often
stuck. Do you really want to pay $30-$50 for a paper that may or may not have
what you want? And Google is complicit in this, it's not just the publishers.
They know it's advertising, so they charge them for it, but the results are
not presented as paid ads.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing>

[http://www.webreference.com/authoring/search_engines/cloakin...](http://www.webreference.com/authoring/search_engines/cloaking/)

------
oostevo
The paper for free, instead of $31.50:

<http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html>

~~~
bravura
Or, 255 versions of it, including the original PDF:
[http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cluster=7...](http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cluster=726238533241861127)

------
russell
Here is the real paper:

<http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html>

Elsevier will charge $31.50 to see the same thing.

------
SingAlong
There this website I found that maintains a piece of history

<http://backrub.c63.be>

Those guys have a year-wise page. Enjoy history!

And the same paper is here too <http://backrub.c63.be/May1998/anatomy.htm>

P.S: you get "foo" when you visit <http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/>
wondering where's the "bar"

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ruddzw
There have already been links here to the free html paper, but if you're more
into PDFs, it's also available for free at
<http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf>

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dylanz
I saw this in my feed reader... 11 years ago ;)

~~~
metatronscube
Yes, but until it reaches the famed Hacker News its nothing!

