Google, the internet search engine, has launched a trial vesion of a new academic service called Google Scholar. Intended as an essential research tool for academics and students, it has been developed in collaboration with scientific and academic publishers. It will offer material not usually accessible via normal search engines because it is locked behind subscription barriers.

Google Scholar will not be linked to from the homepage of Google.com and will not initially include the text advertisements found on Google’s search results pages.

The service does not make free all academic resources, but is an extension of Google’s basic search engine, specialising in identifying academic texts and reports. A Google spokesman declined to say how many more books and documents had been indexed and made searchable through the service which on the surface could prove a significant challenge to established academic publishers like Reed Elsevier and Pearson.

The Google Scholar servic is designed to aid researchers in tracking down peer-reviewed papers, books and technical reports. Search results show where an item may be found on the web and also has the facility to identify holding libraries in the UK if the book or document is not available online.

The page looks much the same as the normal Google home page and results are displayed in the same way. Key words, names of publications or authors can all be used to search for documents, but instead of returning results for the entire web, Google Scholar only searches academic material. Although meant for more specific research, searching for Bart Simpson returns over 150 results including links to books on The Simpsons and Western culture and documents on the evolution of the English language.

The new service may identify documents previously inaccessible to normal search engines, but full viewing of some articles still requires subscription, depending on the publishers.

Anurag Acharya, who led the project for Google, said that his motivation was in part a desire to give something back to the academic community from which Google emerged. There was also the practical matter of confronting the problem found by many students that library materials can be out of date.

"Google Scholar will make the world's scientific literature universally accessible," he told The New York Times. "We want everyone to be able to stand on the shoulders of giants."

Initial responses to Google Scholar have been favourable from those in the online community, although questions have been raised as to what constitutes “academic material”.

“If students and academics think they can get what they need from Google, the odds are slim that they will bother with library resources at all, even if much of what they are after is there. They might not know that library databases exist, but they sure know Google”, said Gary Price of ResourceShelf.com.

Google announced the launch of the new service on the same day it announced that increased competition from rivals Yahoo and Microsoft make its current growth rate unsustainable.

“Yahoo already has ties to academic publishers although it does not have a way to search through the material, “says Daniel Sullivan of Search Engine Watch, “ but it’s likely that if will not be long before it does.”

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