Web Search–Google
Source: Peter Jacso
Side-by-Side Native Search Engines vs Google Scholar
Peter Jacso from the University of Hawaii and Peter’s Digital Reference Shelf has let us know (thanks Peter!) of a new PolySearch module that he’s developed to test Google Scholar. He writes, “This PolySearch engine shows side by side what results are retrieved by the special Google Scholar search engine versus the native search software from the archives of some publishers which let in the crawlers of Google Scholar as a special privilege for binge crawling.”

Like Google Scholar, Peter’s new PolySearch module is still a beta. His full review will appear in early December on Digital Reference Shelf.

His conclusions, so far? He writes, “Google indexed the full text of the digital archives fed to it directly by 29 scholarly publishers, and a number of preprint servers and digital facilitators’ sites which host thousands of scholarly journals. Preliminary tests have shown that Google Scholar often retrieves far fewer unique items than the native search engines of the publishers. On the positive side, Google Scholar links to citing references if the document was cited by journals indexed in Google Scholar, and provides the immensely useful citedness score of the documents. When Google Scholar has more “hits” for a query, they often turn out to be duplicates and triplicates (not always displayed adjacently) with a separate hit for the TOC entry, the abstract, the PDF file and (if available) the HTML file. Although their URLs are slightly different, they take you to the same spot in the archive. These are redundant and confusing…” In June, Peter wrote this review of the Cross-Ref/Google project.

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