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Google Announces Two New Ventures
By Gwendolyn Bradley
The popular Internet company Google now has a search engine designed specifically for scholarly research. Available at http://scholar.google.com, the engine limits its searches to peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, reports, and other materials deemed of interest to scholars. The engine retrieves citations to works that are not available online or that are available only by subscription. Results are ranked by relevance, which is calculated through consideration of the author, source, and other factors including how often the materials are cited in other indexed material; clicking on the number of citations produces a list of them.
The company also announced in December that it will work with the New York Public Library as well as libraries at Harvard and Stanford universities and the universities of Michigan and Oxford to scan books from their collections so that they can be made available digitally on the Internet. Google will scan works that are in the public domain and make the full texts of those books available online. More controversial is its plan to scan copyrighted books and provide online short excerpts that contain the phrase searched for by users. Company officials say that this use would not violate copyright law, but some publishers argue that it would.
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