
Changes to Google Scholar - sndean
https://scholar.googleblog.com/2017/09/better-ways-of-getting-around.html
======
Horatius
Ugh! What a horrible UI revision. Mobile has completely destroyed web design
for anything larger than an iPhone. Stupid round pictures? Really? (And
thousands of clean square ones now vignetted and made to look stupid against a
round background?) Items in the Areas of Interest list chopped off with a ...
and so made illegible? More empty white space pushing actual data off the
bottom of the screen? The Metrics section used to be extremely interesting,
with comparative data from many fields; that looks to be completely gone --
how could something that useful be eliminated? [Wait, the "learn more" page
says the subcategories are still there in the left column, but I don't see any
left column.] Come on, Google. Don't any of your people use actual computers
any more?

~~~
Iv
In 2017, I don't understand why UIs are not totally configurable by now. It
should be clear that people have different tastes. I am a fan of full-text
dense interfaces a la Reddit but I know I am in a minority. I wish I could
activate a content-only CSS.

Well, I do understand actually. It is about ads revenue. Fuck that. I wish
this ecosystem finally dies.

~~~
treehau5
Start paying for software then. (Not just directed towards you, but also
towards anyone who has these thoughts. That's the only way we get off this
model, by showing other models are profitable as well)

~~~
ChickeNES
So much paid software has awful interfaces as well though

~~~
treehau5
So much free software does as well: see facebook.

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n1000
Scholar is by far the most powerful search site for academic literature. They
not only find new publications weeks before other platforms do, but also find
far more literature from all sources.

Nevertheless, I feel like this is one of these half-hearted Google projects
and doesn't fully live up to its potential. This relatively subtle UI change
is a good example that they don't seem to care too much about taking it
further. I just pray Google doesn't shut it down one day.

~~~
geraltofrivia
Its interesting how the big guys never truly paid attention to their academic
search portals. I remember MS Academic Search to be very useful, which
thereafter remained as is to the point of being clearly outdated. And then, on
a bright sunny day, discontinued. Only to emerge years later, imbued with a
fresh interface, horrible search and confusing UI.

Scholar too felt ignored like its a bastard child, but this new update looks
promising, not in term of their changes, but due to the fact that this implies
they haven't boxed it yet. Also, they haven't "revamped" the search, so I'm
not worried about the core functionality.

Most likely this behavior stems from the fact that this service doesn't
generate revenues for them (I'm assuming so, please correct me if I'm wrong).
If so, then how does a small company keep up its own academic search portal?:
Semantic Scholar by Allen.

~~~
Vinnl
> this service doesn't generate revenues for them (I'm assuming so, please
> correct me if I'm wrong).

Considering that there are quite a few researchers working at Google, I can
imagine that the fact that they have this tool available to them indirectly
causes some revenue. (And also, goodwill in the academic community, i.e. a
community of potential future employees.)

------
JorgeGT
If anyone from Google Scholar is reading this, please, please, add a DOI field
to the BiBTex citation. It is required in every serious journal and it's
tiresome to copy the citation, then open the article page and look for the DOI
to add manually.

This small change would be more welcome that any other UI refreshment, I
guarantee it.

------
puzzle
Wow, both Alex and Anurag are still working on Scholar. They started the
project almost fifteen years ago. Google infrastructure all around it changed
entirely over that time; I'm wondering if this is another major rewrite or
"just" a substantial UI update to meet Material Design guidelines.

~~~
oh_sigh
It seems just like a UI tweak. Which is fine...but anyone who is doing serious
research or is just an enamored amateur will quickly get over the quirks of
their tools.

~~~
puzzle
Most of the rewrites are behind the scenes. You'd only notice if you looked
e.g. at latency, reliability and trigger rates. I think Scholar is even older
than Borg.

~~~
oh_sigh
Are you saying for scholar or in general for software projects?

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dingaling
"If you thought Google Scholar had about twenty different screens, you'd be
half right."

It also seems that Google has about 20 different blogging outlets. Shouldn't
they all be on blog.google by now?

~~~
zimmund
If there's one thing Google does right it's fragmentation :)

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soyiuz
Please please please fix "sort by date" filter. Searching for "natural
language processing" returns 3,330,000 results with the default "sort by
relevance" and 4,730 with "sort by date."

~~~
userbinator
I've noticed this completely nonsensical behaviour with regular Google too.
"Sort by" shouldn't ever be a "filter" \--- but an ordering.

The result counts are usually highly inflated and approximate anyway (i.e. can
you eventually actually get all 3M+ results?), so perhaps they don't mean all
that much.

The best explanation for that anomaly, which is more of an excuse, is that
they don't want to spend computing power sorting all the results.

Nevermind the fact that sorting by date is probably much easier than computing
"relevance" and sorting by that...

------
frozenport
The cite feature is really awsome, and I started using it when I noticed a day
or two ago!

No more needing to navigate publisher websites, or searching for an obscure
article.

Would be cool to have a way to cite any url directly to EndNote.

~~~
tmalsburg2
In my experience the quality of the BibTeX offered by Google Scholar is really
low, too much missing or incorrect information. Crossref is much better:
[https://www.crossref.org/](https://www.crossref.org/)

~~~
jarvist
I find this online tool very quick & produces fairly good quality BibTeX. I
think it mainly uses the Crossref API.
[http://www.doi2bib.org/#/doi](http://www.doi2bib.org/#/doi)

------
epaulson
The change I really wish Scholar would announce is adding an official API. I'd
like to be able to link papers in my library back to some kind of Scholar ID
and walk out the citation and 'related' articles from there. I'd feel much
better if the only option wasn't a screen scraping library.

It's really a shame that no university library consortium has tried to build
this themselves.

~~~
aargh_aargh
Not an API and not really maintained, but here's a handy client:

[https://github.com/ckreibich/scholar.py](https://github.com/ckreibich/scholar.py)

------
popcorncolonel
I wish there were an easy way to browse the most recent papers by category. Or
get an email of the daily digest of what's added today for my favorite
categories.

I know arXiv does this, but it's in such an unreadable format that it makes me
just want to read it on the site.

------
ismail
1\. Anyone have an idea of the algorithm used for ranking? Page rank?

2\. Anyone know where to get my hands on a data set of papers with citations
in an easy to parse format? Would like to do some analysis

~~~
Vinnl
1\. It's not a simply algorithm, but yes, page rank plays a role (using
citations rather than, or in addition to, hyperlinks). 2\. crossref.org has an
API? Or do you want the actual papers included - because if so, open access
needs to see significantly more uptake first.

------
jknz
Typing "sch<tab>" in the chrome address bar used to search on Google scholar
directly. It went broken yesterday on my browser.

------
do5
"Author profile pages got a cleaner look, especially on mobile devices. Rest
assured, we did not change your citation counts - at least not intentionally."

------
webwanderings
Academia.edu has eaten their lunch. Don't know if two compare deeply but
people use academia.edu more than anything else I know in this category.

~~~
sackofmugs
That's funny, because I was just thinking how Academia.edu has become a joke
site, while everyone in my field uses Google Scholar daily. It's almost
impossible to find references, put together a bib list, or navigate through
related work without Google Scholar.

~~~
SubiculumCode
People in my field use Google Scholar and NIH for search, but researchgate as
a kind of cv.

~~~
dpq
Instead of becoming a more or less of a clone of Facebook news feed for
researchers, RG has become infuriatingly full of nag boxes, and in its efforts
to get you use the website more prevents you from actually using it at all.

~~~
SubiculumCode
Some are useful. But it has begun to cross the line. For example, the nags for
their new feature for organizing research into projects are annoying, and then
I started getting notices that a deadline was approaching for an update to my
project. Eff that. I have plenty of real deadlines already.

