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Ask HN: Google Goes Popular?
Lately, I have noticed when I am doing a scientific search on Google,maybe an algorithm, resent research paper etc., I get less scientific sources than I normally would and more what I would consider "popular" sources. Has anyone else noticed this? Let's face it Google is pretty much my lens into the world. I am not near a major university library, so I do not have much choice.
I do not like this "pressure" to fit into Google's popular mold. Does anyone else have a better search engine for meaningful sources. I'm not saying Wikipedia, About, or Ehow are not creditable sources... hmm... yes yes, I am saying that. Any Help? Maybe something that indexes noncommercial sites only...
- sounddust 17y agoAre you using Google Scholar for this research? http://scholar.google.com/ http://scholar.google.com/
- runn1ng 17y agosadly, Google Scholar mostly gives me a lot of articles... that are all behind a paywall.
- rortian 17y agoThat mostly varies by area. Humanities are super tough to get. Most sciences, especially physics, will have a pdf that scholar will point you to. Of course, if you are at a university you can basically get anything.
- middus 17y ago...which does not make them less relevant, does it?
- araneae 17y agoYou should e-mail the corresponding author and ask them to send you a .pdf. It helps if you claim to be at a university from a poor, developing country and your library doesn't have any subscriptions. Some authors will also have the .pdf uploaded on their website.
- robg 17y agoUpvote, but not for the suggestion to lie. It's a terribly inefficient system and all government grants should require any resulting publication be openly accessible. But until we get there, simply look for their website or send them a nice, short email with the publication in the subject line. If there are multiple authors, you could have more success with a middle author than the leading or trailing authors (first and last are often the lab head). An alternative is looking for an administrative contact on their website.
- icey 17y agoI wonder if this might have something to do with it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1082209 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1082209
- vitobcn 17y agoWhen I was a student I used CiteSeer all the time, but I guess it depends on the area of your research. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/ http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- byrneseyeview 17y agoAdd filetype:pdf to your query.
- tbgvi 17y agoAgreed, advanced search is your friend when looking for solid research. In addition to looking for pdf's I often get better results filtering by .edu sites as well.
- olalonde 17y agoWikipedia is noncommercial.
- litewulf 17y agoI'm kind of curious: hypothetically imagine Google had super crazy search personalization... and knew when you were interested in scientific sources in a field versus just the wikipedia article. Would you be happier because your searches are great, or freaked out because you feel your privacy is being invaded.
- wooster 17y agoGoogle search has been almost useless for me since they dropped implicit AND for implicit OR. As in, the query [random trie] is now (random OR trie). The query [+random +trie] returns much better results (random AND trie). I've seriously been considering starting a search engine just to get back to a ~2002 era Google level of usability.
- julio_the_squid 17y agoI agree, plus their word mangling/assumptions are out of control. I often have to use double quotes to make it clear that yes, what I typed in is what I'm searching for.