Michael Nielsen » Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?

This is a very insightful entry by Michael Nielsen.  Due to my bias, I had to immediately skip to Part II before i came back and read Part I. Some of the things i might question – Automatic spelling correct/relevancy ranking/alerting service, etc are indeed offered on Scopus. But whether they are good (I believe they are competitive) is certainly something the users will judge and Michael would qualify as one. I haven’t heard from any of the users i talked to that any of these feature are poor but again it could be my bias.

A great search engine for science: ISI’s Web of Knowledge, Elsevier’s Scopus and Google Scholar are remarkable tools, but there’s still huge scope to extend and improve scientific search engines [6]. With a few exceptions, they don’t do even basic things like automatic spelling correction, good relevancy ranking of papers (preferably personalized), automated translation, or decent alerting services. They certainly don’t do more advanced things, like providing social features, or strong automated tools for data mining. Why not have a public API [7] so people can build their own applications to extract value out of the scientific literature? Imagine using techniques from machine learning to automatically identify underappreciated papers, or to identify emerging areas of study.

via Michael Nielsen » Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?.

Read the article in its entirety. It  is very insightful and several pointers can be taken away as always.

Google Books and the man

Many people love to read books online. I’m not much of an online book reader. I prefer my books to be made of paper. But maybe that’s because i haven’t really tried. If and when Kindle comes out with support for color, I’ll probably jump in. Anyway, I digress.

To date i have not paid too much attention to Google Books.  That is until i got this article in my feed today.

Google Books Just Got Better: Better Search Within Books, Embedding, & More.

I feel like i’ve come late to the party but probably just in time when the fun begins. If your experience reading books online has been getting a PDF version and scrolling through the pages or perhaps downloading a chapter at a time, then prepare to be amazed.

Here’s what I found most intriguing -

First the left hand pane.

A book's left hand pane

Three very good and important features

1. An overview page: Its not clear to me where they pulled all this from but it looks like there is a brief abstract about the book, keywords and phrases (I don’t believe these are author supplied so they must have pulled out key terms/topics), reviews (that’s ok) and a slew of other information.

2. Search in this book: Its not just a simple search feature. Search within this book. The results as stated in commentary linked above -

appear in their context in a list of short snippets from the text

Good gracious almighty… how can you not be swept off your feet by that?

3. I also love the Related books feature but i haven’t tested it enough to see if they are truly relevant.

There are other features like page turners that don’t necessarily turn me on but its these simple things that add sweetness to the user experience. The fact that they care enough about the user to add that little feature will bring me back to Google Books.

And apparently you can embed the book in your blog. I tried but haven’t been able to get it to work. I’ll work on that.

Sure Amazon does a mighty fine job as well. If you compare what Amazon and Google do for the same book you’ll probably find both search within book features are nice. I prefer the Google version though, where we get small paragraph snippets within the results page instead of the entire page. That’s just me. Related books appeared to be similar except that Amazon points out 5 instead of 3 by default (hardly a differentiation).

All said, they are both kind of similar. I feel like i prefer Google’s layout better maybe because I’m just familiar with it or maybe it feels cleaner… just can’t lay my finger on it.

Both are definitely waaaaay better than some of the interfaces i have seen with more traditional publishers.

OK… i’m hooked. When’s Kindle color coming out?

[Update June 20, 2009: For a detailed summary of the latest Google Books feature - read this post from Brandon Badger on the Google Book Search blog]

At Google’s Searchology event, executives give search ’state of the union’

This is brilliant. I can see this kind of feature applicable to scientific research like searching through topics or when looking at an article visually representing the article against its references and cited by articles.

Marissa Mayer and her team are introducing new features to Google’s search results.

Via a tool called “search options,” users can now quickly “slice and dice” their search results in a variety of new ways.

On the results page, you can click “show options,” for example, on a search of “solar ovens.” You can then quickly filter the results to see video entries, entries from discussion forums and even user reviews that have undergone “sentiment analysis” — that is, whether the reviewer liked the product (a solar oven) or not.

Also included on the search options is a feature called “wonder wheel,” where Google will draw a simple topic diagram that connects your search query to similar topics. For “solar oven,” you might be given the option to search “how solar ovens work,” or “homemade solar ovens.”

from -http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/google-searchology-search-marissa-mayer-udi-manber.html

Is Search Broker? Presentation from Endeca

This presentation is actually several months old but worth going over

Tag Galaxy

This is so cool just to play with. Doesn’t actually go anywhere but fun.

Tag Galaxy.

Ambiently – search and browse working together?

Interesting concept. I discovered this blog from a link on RWW. I’ve just been playing around with their button. At first i tried this out on my favorite football site (Go Bengals!).  I went to a specific article and then clicked on the button. It didn’t quite get me what i was looking for… The results were totally unrelated to the football team page.

I tried this on a scientific publishers page and then on a CNN article, I don’t think this is quite working (but CNN article did return me some relevant links).

I also liked this quote on their blog but i wish they would like to the specific publication where Peter Morville mentions that so i can read it in context…

As the noted author Peter Morville said, the future of search will be “a future where search and browsing work together.”

via ambiently blog » Blog Archive » What are the differences between Ambiently and a search engine?.

gpeerreview – Google Code

What is GPeerReview?

Traditional journals provide two services:

1. Find capable reviewers who give feedback, and recommend whether or not the journal should endorse a paper.

2. Publish papers by making them easily accessible to other researchers.

With modern technology, it is no longer necessary for these two services to be tied together. Authors should be able to:

1. Publish now and seek endorsements later.

2. Seek any number of endorsements.

GPeerReview attempts to makes it easy for authors to seek post-publication endorsements of their works. We provide the following tools:

* A command-line tool to digitally sign endorsements (done and available).

* A web-based version of the signing tool (about 70% done).

* Client tools for analyzing endorsement graphs to establish credibility (in planning stages).

* Additional tools to facilitate the running of endorsement organizations (in the brain-storming stages).

* Tools for analyzing citation graphs (in the brain-storming stages).

via gpeerreview – Google Code.

Knol: a unit of knowledge

Knol: a unit of knowledge.

Search Innovation on Display at AltSearchEngines Conference « AltSearchEngines

So much to catch up with

We saw four major opportunities that search entrepreneurs are pursuing:

1) Vertical Search – Whether it be image, video, health, or even green search, dozens of entrepreneurs are working on building highly focused vertical search engines.

2) Semantic Search – A group of promising start-ups are focused on using natural language processing or other approaches to build search engines that can understand and respond to the actual meaning of a query.

3) Discovery Engines – A handful of search engines, such as Kosmix and Worio, are working on building engines that integrate structured data from high quality sources to present users with a starting point to discover the best content on a given topic.

4) New Presentation Models – Many search entrepreneurs are working on new ways to present search results, by changing the visual presentation or by clustering by topic or data source.

via Search Innovation on Display at AltSearchEngines Conference « AltSearchEngines.

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines – ReadWriteWeb

I keeping looking up RWW for alternate search engines. I admit i’ve been interested in KartOO but maybe i’m just not savvy enough to get it so i dont use them as much. Definitely something i’ll keep coming back to when i get ‘wiser’. Also read the rest of the articles for other concepts

Perhaps Google’s most glaring and egregious shortcoming is their insistence on displaying the outcome of a search in an impossibly long, one-dimensional list of results. We all intuitively know that the World Wide Web is just that, a three dimensional (or “3-D”) web of interconnected Web pages. Several search engines, known as clustering engines, routinely present their search results on a two-dimensional map that one can navigate through in search of the best answer. Search engines like KartOO and Quintura are excellent examples.

via The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines – ReadWriteWeb.