Google Scholar Turns 10 Next Week

Google Scholar, the free search engine for scholarly literature that has transformed the way scientists consult literature online, will turn 10 on November 18.

According to a survey by the scientific journal Nature, nearly 60 percent of scientists use the service - co-developed by an Indian-origin scientist at Google - regularly.

"Once we launched it, usage grew exponentially. One big difference was that we were relevance-ranking [sorting results by relevance keeping in mind the user's request] which scholarly search services had not done previously. They were reverse-chronological [providing the newest results first]. And we crawled the full text of research articles, though we did not include the full text from all the publishers when we started." its co-creator Anurag Acharya was quoted as saying by Nature.

He still runs the service with a team of nine people.

The primary role of Google Scholar is to give back to the research community and "we are able to do so because it is not very expensive from Google's point of view," he said. Google Scholar has also introduced author profile pages for the scientific community.

When asked how hard it was to convince publishers to let the Google Scholar service crawl their full text, Acharya said, "It depends. You have to think back to a decade ago, when web search was considered lightweight - what people would use to find pictures of Britney Spears, not scholarly articles. But we knew people were sending us purely academic queries. We just had to persuade publishers that our service would be used and would bring them more traffic. We were working with many of them already before Google Scholar launched, of course."

Written with inputs from IANS