Google Scholar added the option to get email alerts when new articles related to your interests are published. For some reason, this feature is not available in Google Alerts and Google Scholar still doesn't offer feeds for search results.

Google Scholar's email alerts feature is special because Google changes your to get better results (for example, [statistical speech recognition] has been changed to [statistical intitle:"speech recognition"]), Google shows a list of sample results and you can manage the alerts only in Google Scholar.


To try the new feature, go to Google Scholar, search for something you're interested in and click on the ugly email icon placed at the top of the search results pages. Even if it's extremely useful for students and researchers, Google Scholar has a cluttered interface with many options. It's the only Google service that uses a check box on the homepage.


{ Thanks, Bill. }

If you ever find an interesting academic paper in Google's search results:


...and when you click on the result, the page says that you need a subscription:


... go back and click on "All n versions", below the search snippet, to find other versions of the paper from Google Scholar. If you're lucky, you'll find the paper in the HTML, PDF or PostScript format.


Tip: to find a link to the full version of an academic paper in Google Scholar, look for the green arrow.

Google started to integrate in the search results information about the scientific papers included in Google Scholar. Below the snippet, Google lists the authors, the number of citations and links to related articles and other versions available online. The integration is not perfect and the search results look cluttered, but it's yet another class of results that have richer snippets.

Here's the top search result for buddy tree (a data structure):


... and the same result at Google Scholar:


Google also shows additional information next to videos, books, web pages that include addresses and tests displaying metadata for forums and extracting specialized information from web pages. While Yahoo tries to convince webmasters to make structured data explicitly available, Google has a more practical approach and uses what's already available to enhance search results.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

There's a new link to Google Scholar in the list of services from the "more" box. Google's search engines for scholarly papers was available on the homepage only if you visited Google from your school.

Google Scholar includes a big list of scientific publications and some of them aren't available in Google's main index. "Google Scholar covers peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and other scholarly literature from all broad areas of research. You'll find works from a wide variety of academic publishers and professional societies, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

Ben Bunnell tells the stories of Google Book Search and Google Scholar, two tools that let you find books and scholar papers. Although both were launched in 2004, Google's founders were thinking about creating a book search tool when they were at Stanford and worked on the Digital Library Initiative.

Many children will go back to school in a short while, so I put myself a question: How would I use Google for my school projects, if I were in high-school again? Let's see:

For math, I could use Google Calculator for unit transformations and to compute complicated expressions. Google Scholar would be helpful to find interesting papers.

Geography would be more pleasant with Google Earth and Google Maps. Imagine all the great photos I could include from Google Earth. I would also use Google search to learn the capitals, the flags, facts about population, area or language. Just type: "Iran flag" or "capital of Iran". For economical information, I would definitely check out Gapminder.

For history, I would type historical events or figures in Image Search and try to imagine the whole scenes. I would also use Google Directory to find high-quality sites, like the ones about Napoleonic Wars.

For chemistry, I would learn more about interesting experiments with Google Video. Google Search may show information about the elements.

Google Earth would be nice for Biology too. The content from National Geographic would make a virtual visit to Africa possible.

Google Groups is helpful to solve many computer science problems. I could find interesting books with Google Books and even read some snippets from important books.


Google Translate would help me learn more foreign languages, I could use the define: operator to find word definitions, Google's spell checker to improve my English, Image Search to know more about art, Google Video to listen classical music, and Writely to write some of my papers or collaborate with my colleagues. I would also use Ask.com for the related searches that are useful to explore a field.

Sometimes you can be a better kid if you have some nice tools. They can't replace good books, but they can complement them.

Google Scholar launched a new feature: ranking the recent papers by their importance. The importance of a paper is established by looking at the previous papers of the author, by counting the citations and their importance. So now you can find recent papers about artificial intelligence ordered by relevance.

Google tried to implement a version of the PageRank algorithm from their web search. In fact, the idea of PageRank came from the way researchers rank the papers and the authors. Instead of citations, web pages have backlinks.

"Google Scholar aims to sort articles the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature. The most relevant results will always appear on the first page."