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If you think that Google can't crawl a paper to find the section labeled 'Abstract' and index it, you are hopelessly naive. Google Scholar sucks because of a la

If you think that Google can't crawl a paper to find the section labeled 'Abstract' and index it, you are hopelessly naive. Google Scholar sucks because of a lack of available, open access papers, not because of technological limitations.

rayiner 14y ago
Google Scholar sucks for legal research too, and it's got a very thorough database of federal cases going back to 1923, and has a formidable database of state cases. It sucks because it uses extremely primitive technology (even if it's start of the art, it's primitive in the grand scheme of things) to perform indexing. Like the web search engine, it relies heavily on things like citation counts, which makes it nearly useless for researching any complex point of law because your search results are full of highly-cited cases that might cover the relevant subject only in passing or in boilerplate. The results are shitty in precisely the way you'd expect them to be based on the kind of algorithms Google uses. The limitations of Google's search algorithms (search algorithms generally) aren't apparent for web searches because by and large everyone is searching for the same things. Google is great at helping people converge onto popular resources like that. It falls apart in situations where you might be the only person searching for a particular issue. The basic problem with search is that computers don't understand documents. The whole idea behind Page Rank was to side-step that by incorporating human intelligence--that is the human intelligence encoded into the graph of links. Further refinements have been based on things like taking into account human behavior in response to search results, and aggregating over all the millions of people who search for the same things. Without all that human intelligence, all that context, you're left with a computer that just sees a bunch of text, instead of background, dicta, holding, etc.

rayiner 14y ago

Google Scholar sucks for legal research too, and it's got a very thorough database of federal cases going back to 1923, and has a formidable database of state cases. It sucks because it uses extremely primitive technology (even if it's start of the art, it's primitive in the grand scheme of things) to perform indexing. Like the web search engine, it relies heavily on things like citation counts, which makes it nearly useless for researching any complex point of law because your search results are full of highly-cited cases that might cover the relevant subject only in passing or in boilerplate. The results are shitty in precisely the way you'd expect them to be based on the kind of algorithms Google uses. The limitations of Google's search algorithms (search algorithms generally) aren't apparent for web searches because by and large everyone is searching for the same things. Google is great at helping people converge onto popular resources like that. It falls apart in situations where you might be the only person searching for a particular issue. The basic problem with search is that computers don't understand documents. The whole idea behind Page Rank was to side-step that by incorporating human intelligence--that is the human intelligence encoded into the graph of links. Further refinements have been based on things like taking into account human behavior in response to search results, and aggregating over all the millions of people who search for the same things. Without all that human intelligence, all that context, you're left with a computer that just sees a bunch of text, instead of background, dicta, holding, etc.