
With Google Reader gone, is Google Scholar next? - jacquesm
http://www.digitopoly.org/2013/03/14/with-google-reader-gone-is-google-scholar-next/
======
da_n
At this point Google has proven it only wants to focus on profitable ventures
or those that tie into Google +. Any service/data aggregation that Google is
solely depended on should be considered at risk of closure at any time, and
such closure should not come as a surprise. Personally I am moving away from
Google except for only the least valuable services; my email, calendar and
everything else are moving elsewhere to paid services. It is the end of the
age of innocence for Google.

~~~
psbp
Wouldn't it make more sense to not pay for your email, calendar and everything
else and wait until Google warns you and gives you months to migrate all of
your data to a competing service?

~~~
niggler
"until Google warns you and gives you months to migrate all of your data to a
competing service"

That's a big assumption. Google _could_ axe a service tomorrow with no notice
(which apple has a tendency of doing)

~~~
MetricMike
But they typically haven't. They've had an excellent track record so far of
giving reasonable notice.

------
streptomycin
_“Usage has declined.” Come on. That is very weak. It may have done so but
that is like saying it is a cold Winter so global warming isn’t true._

I don't understand the analogy, unless we are supposed to assume that there is
some very large and natural cyclic pattern in Google Reader usage?

~~~
Xcelerate
He's saying that one data point doesn't indicate a trend.

...but I'm guessing you knew that.

------
mjn
In CS, CiteSeer/CiteSeerX still has quite a bit of usage, though it's been
losing users to Google Scholar due to the latter's wider coverage and better
search. A shutdown of Google Scholar would likely inject fresh interest. Also,
its code and data are all under open licenses, so a third party could
jumpstart their own fork if they don't like the way the primary developers are
overseeing it.

~~~
mhluongo
We're trying to provide a better interface for searching computer science at
<http://scholr.ly>. I'd love your feedback.

~~~
tinco
Hi, I tried a search for "model based testing" and the results seem not to be
of very high quality. Are you lacking sources?

Also, it's not possible to discern high-quality from low-quality papers in any
way. As a graduate student, I weed out what I should read by reading the
titles+abstracts in the order of the amount of citations. Citation amount
maybe isn't the most optimal indicator of quality but it is a strong one.

In order of importance: Scope (does it cover all journals?), Quality (how do I
know if something's worth reading), Speed (I noticed your search runs a little
on the slow side).

Other than that the site looks great, I'd certainly switch if you would get
the basics down :)

~~~
mhluongo
Hm, right now we've got the same coverage as CiteSeerX (where most of our data
comes from), and are working on expanding. What sources do you particularly
think are lacking?

We've talked quite a bit internally about whether to include citations counts.
It's a tough call, but until we're happier with our scoring it might make
sense to help bolster result reputation.

Thanks for the feedback!

~~~
tinco
Hey no problem :) I'm just a student so I'm not researching a particular field
at the moment, the Model Based Testing paper I was looking for I had to read
for a course.

I just wouldn't use your site as long as I feel _any_ journal is missing,
since google does not give me that feeling.

------
JustARandomGuy
I'm expecting Google Code to be shut down sooner or later. It hasn't received
any new features for years; for instance, GitHub, BitBucket and Sourceforge
have the ability to set a custom domain and Google Code has never implemented
it, despite this 5+ year old issue:
<https://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=1222>

Google has also been moving their code examples and open source to Github (
<https://github.com/googlecloudplatform> ), and completely ignoring their in
house open source hosting.

~~~
niggler
I wouldn't be surprised if many of those people came to google through an
acquisition or other means (I took a very cursory scan but couldn't find a
contributor that identified as working for google out of mountain view)

------
lrei
Doubt it.

Scholar is mostly search. Reader was a lot of things: search (like google
news) sync engine, social network (like G+), a complex web app etc. It's
probably a lot easier to have someone on the search team maintain scholar than
it was to maintain reader and it doesn't conflict (yet) with G+.

Given how many of their famous employees were poached from academia, scholar
is probably worth keeping for recruitment purposes alone. Not to mention
employee morale.

~~~
takluyver
It also has citation tracking, alerts and journal metrics. Admittedly tracking
citations is somewhat like tracking links for pagerank, but it must take a bit
of effort - it's not just a regular search constrained to journal databases.

As a regular user of Google Scholar, I hope you're right about the recruitment
& morale purposes. But I've heard several people making a similar argument
against killing Reader - it serves a demographic that Google might especially
want to keep on side. That didn't appear to stop them.

~~~
aheilbut
It must have taken a _lot_ of effort, and/or licensing agreements with
publishers or the existing citation indexes.

------
fatjokes
I disagree. Of all companies, Google actively engages academia and works hard
to maintain ties (e.g., faculty summits, research grants, etc.) They have a
lot of collaborations and want to foster good relations so that good students
will be sent their way. It's been a largely successful effort.

Scholar is a vital tool for a lot of members of academia, not to mention
Google's own research and research-heavy engineering groups. A lot of faculty
---particularly young faculty and PhD students---actively maintain profiles on
scholar and use it to track their own publications and citations. The minor
cost of keeping it running is a small price to pay, relative to the bad blood
it would generate within the research community if it is shut down.

------
kragen
For some time, I was keeping a collection of items like this under the tag
"decentralization-stories" at <http://del.icio.us/kragen/decentralization-
stories>. Of course this was deleted.

~~~
scw
Why was it deleted? But yes, that does illustrate the issue.

~~~
kragen
I declined to accept the new, abusive user agreement terms of the new
Delicious management.

~~~
gojomo
I don't remember the new ToS being that bad... but did you perchance export to
a private backup or alternate service (like Pinboard)?

~~~
kragen
Yes, I have backups. And I've been adding to them since then; I even wrote a
browser extension to do it with. I just haven't put them online again. :(

------
jkldotio
Google has stated before they think of themselves as working on an AI. Like
Google's scanning of books, reading all the academic articles isn't for
popular consumption but for their knowledge engine. Think of IBM's medical
engine. Zero chance they will stop scanning them, and a very low chance they
will shut it down for the public.

------
Lost_BiomedE
I would bet it will be google charts, which would be a shame. They 'renew' its
existence every year and have said they will give a year warning. I am
currently building a site with it but will start looking into a backup for
migration, if things go well.

The only reason it might survive is that google still uses it for google
finance.

~~~
azov
Charts are also powering Google docs, so they are probably safe in the near
future.

------
dysoco
I wonder when they will kill Google Earth, we have Google Maps and with WebGL
I think Google Earth is pointless.

~~~
arb99
they license it out so less chance of Google Earth being shut down
<http://www.google.co.uk/earth/media/licensing.html>

------
jccalhoun
I really Google Scholar doesn't go away. While there are other academic search
sites, most of them seems to be science-focused. As someone in the humanities,
I don't find these to be useful. The university library has lots of database
searches but they pretty uniformly stink. MS Academic search is ok but it
still doesn't really have much humanities stuff, and other places like
deepdyve.com can't stack up to google's search accuracy.

------
yamalight
Microsoft Academic Search is quite much better anyways

~~~
mjn
I like its interface better, but find its coverage, at least in my area (AI)
to be so much worse than Google Scholar that I rarely use it. New articles
sometimes don't show up for years, and inconsistently.

~~~
yamalight
Hm.. That's curious. Works pretty much fine for SemWeb stuff

~~~
mjn
I hadn't checked in a while, but some spot-checking right now suggests it may
depend on whether you care about conferences (which in my area are important).
Seems to do a better job on journals, but to be 2-3 years out of date on
conferences.

For example, it doesn't seem to have indexed much from ICML since 2010
(though, curiously, it indexes exactly 3 papers from ICML 2011):
[http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Conference/35/icml-
in...](http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Conference/35/icml-
international-conference-on-machine-learning)

Similar story for AAAI:
[http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Conference/251/aaai-n...](http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Conference/251/aaai-
national-conference-on-artificial-intelligence)

One thing that's neat about GS is that it has a negative lag instead: it's
already indexing papers from a bunch of conferences that haven't happened yet,
and whose proceedings aren't officially out. It finds the versions that
authors post on their own webpages, or in their institutional repositories,
almost as soon as they're posted. For example, you can already read a good
portion of the CHI 2013 proceedings if you search on the ISBN:
[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22978-1-4503-...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22978-1-4503-1899-0%2F13%2F04%22&btnG=)

~~~
yamalight
Hm. That's quite sad. It does much better job with SemWeb conferences. Though
small ones are still not there, yeah. Hopefully they'll improve :)

------
rpgmaker
I still believe that Google will reverse course on this greader issue...

