Amazon, Google Book Search, and Google Scholar.(peter's picks & pans)

Online, March, 2008 by Jacso, Peter

The picks include my longtime favorite Amazon.com, which somehow never made it to my lists of picks (probably because it is so much of a classic trailblazer). Because it is constantly enriched, it is better for me to honor it later rather than never, especially as it is a tool that I use everyday as a ready-reference resource. The other pick is Google Book Search, which is barely 1 year old. After a poor start, it quickly fixed its software problems and has become an outstanding tool for discovering the content of several million books. The pan is Google Scholar which, undoubtedly, is an appealingly rich, convenient, and free resource to use for finding scholarly documents, or at least for leading users to them. It's very efficient, but it often dispenses misleading...