Google Scholar: thin edge of the wedge?

Information Outlook, Jan, 2005 by Stephen Abram

As I write this column, the hottest news is the November announcement by Google of their long-expected new offering, Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com). This new service purports to offer a safe place for researchers to go and search for scholarly materials without the noise of the open Web. It's frustrating to search for scholarly research about Mercury, the Roman god, or mercury, the chemical element, and be deluged with irrelevant information and ads about the Ford Mercury car or the new Freddie Mercury top hits compilation. If Google can solve this problem for the academic context, then maybe there's hope for the rest of the world's searchers.

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Barbara Quint, editor of Searcher, quoted Anurag Acharya, principal engineer for Google Scholar, that the goal was to "make it easier to find content, open access or not. The first step in any research is to find the information you need to learn and then build on that. Not being able to find information hinders scholarly endeavor." (http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb041122-1.shtml)

What is a scholar anyway? Is it everything from a newly minted undergrad through graduate researchers to R&D specialists in private labs and industry? Can Google Scholar serve this wide range of needs and ability? What do scholars really care about? Is it finding that needle in haystack? Is it just getting that essay written? Is it information at all, or discovery and research success?

What do librarians care about? Comprehensiveness, quality, authority, and brand could head most of my colleagues' short lists. Have we done well in delivering this? Have we met the usability criteria? Have we delivered to scholars the wealth of resources in a way that even approximates Google's position in their minds for ease of use and satisfaction? I doubt it. We know most scholarly researchers start with Google. This is not necessarily a bad thing. When we are honest with ourselves, we admit that most librarians start with Google. It's a fine place to play with words, look for links, and focus a search before heading for the "quality" stuff--if needed. In a scholarly environment, we sometimes make assumptions about our users' real needs. Perhaps it's time to revisit those assumptions.

It would be naive to assume that Google Scholar won't grow into a powerhouse. Let's think about some of the opportunities for Google here. Then let's think about what we must do to offer better service, better content, and better context. Let's meet the real needs of researchers, not advertisers.

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The Potential Future Threat

Obviously Google Scholar is just a beta and merely the first tiny step in Google's strategy to deliver a scholarly search service. Google is a very smart company and does a wonderful job phasing its new offerings into the marketplace. With very little marketing or advertising, but great brand recognition, word of mouth and market positioning, Google has staked out an extremely strong position--almost deity-like--in the collective minds of the information marketplace.

Evidently Google's key customers must be demanding this scholarly offering, that is the advertisers and marketing communications folks who actually provide Google's revenue base and who need targeted access to the young, educated demographic that this sort of service would deliver. For advertisers and direct marketers, the sweet spot has always been that key demographic where opinions are still flexible and lifelong habits can be nurtured. Young scholars also have a greater potential to grow into high-income consumers. At this point Google Scholar has no ads or sponsored links--but those of us a tiny bit longer in the tooth remember when basic Google had no ads either.

Google's future steps can already be read in the tea leaves of this beta version. Google's current relationships with scholarly information and metadata providers are included in Google Scholar. Those include, the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, and OCLC. We can already see inklings of the Web scraper's next generation strategy in Microsoft's relationships with more than 120 of the traditional library-oriented content vendors through Microsoft Office and Microsoft's Research Panes functionality.

A similar strategy at Google could deliver some pretty cool content and do so in context of the rest of the Web and integrated with open access content in repositories. Many of the links you get through Google Scholar lead you to paid content. Just input your micro-payment option of choice--Visa, Amex, MasterCard, PayPal, whatever. This is not bad on its own. I've often wanted direct, immediate access to content to which I would not subscribe. However, students could easily pay for content that is available for no charge to them through their academic library and R&D scientists can pay for stuff already acquired by their corporate library. Hmmm ... seems like you can have your cake and eat it too. Content providers can get revenue from more than one end of the commercial environment.