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April 20, 2006

Google Scholar = Recency + Relevancy

Good news for your inner Information Retrieval junkie - Google Scholar has souped up their academic paper search to include "sort by date", but added classic PageRank-esque features so you get what would hopefully be the ideal combination of recency and relevancy.

From the Google blog:

It's not just a plain sort by date, but rather we try to rank recent papers the way researchers do, by looking at the prominence of the author's and journal's previous papers, how many citations it already has, when it was written, and so on. Look for the new link on the upper right for "Recent articles" -- or switch to "All articles" for the full list.

I imagine this is a test case for recency/relevancy combo-ranking in other areas of Google search, like Google Blog Search, which could really use it. Depending on the search you're doing, it could be very nice in the main search results, too.

Stuff like this is pretty meaningless to Joe and Jill Websurfer, but it keeps the search cognoscenti happy, and they're the sneezers who make and break Google's rep as the most relevant search engine (at least they did when Google was getting started). And they've been getting a bit fussy lately.

Personal feature request: How about a way to strip out blogs from the search results? I think search quality would go way up, especially for commercial products where you might actually want to buy something or research a purchase, not read some random dork's musings on it. I think it could be easily done, just remove any page that has an accompanying RSS feed.

Microsoft rolled out their own academic search a short while back at Windows Live Academic. InformationWeek and Alex Halavais both have good reviews.

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