News & Views item - November  2004

 

 

Google Gives a Nod to its Origins. (November 19, 2004)

    Larry Page (l.) and Sergey Brin (r.) met at Stanford University in the mid-1990s, where they were doing doctorates in the computer sciences. Developing a new system of internet search engine in their college dormitory, and naming it Google (a "googol" is the number 10100 and a "googolplex" is )*, they dropped out of Stanford to found the company.

The university dropouts are now giving something directly back to academe by setting up Google Scholar Beta with the slogan Stand on the shoulders of giants.

 

Journal articles, theses, books, preprints, and technical reports in any and all fields of research are its meat. The search algorithms Google Scholar uses follow along the lines of its parent. As Declan Butler reports in new@Nature they "exploit the structure of the links between web pages. Pages with many links pointing to them are considered 'authorities', and ranked highest in search returns. The ranking is refined by taking into account the importance of the origins of links to a [web] paper. 'We don't just look at the number of links,' says Sergey Brin. 'A link from the Nature home page will be given more weight than a link from my home page.' Google Scholar works in much the same way, using the citations at the end of each paper, rather than web links."

 

A large number of research publications have agreed for Google automatons to completely scan their journals. A user accessing a Google Scholar link moves to the publisher's Web page. If recognised as a paid up subscriber he can access the full text, otherwise he can retrieve an abstract and/or information on how to buy the article. BUT if there exists one or more free versions of the article somewhere on the Web, e.g. on the author's own website, the link is listed.


*The term googol was coined in 1938 by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. Milton was asked to think up a name for a very big number, namely, 1 with a hundred zeros after it. At the same time that he suggested ‘googol’ he gave a name for a still larger number: ‘Googolplex’. A googolplex is 10 to the googol power. Kasner publicised the concept in his book Mathematics and the Imagination.

 

1 googol = 10100 = 10, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000