Re: Central site for IR

["Joseph Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

No quarrel with the distributed repository idea, but let's not 
put all the search eggs in Google's basket. Google is wonderful 
for what it is wonderful at, but it is not nearly as good for 
professional and scientific information.  Google is a keyword 
search engine with an outstanding method for ranking results 
(PageRank).  PageRank analyzes links between sites. This is great 
when there ARE links, but academic papers can be both relevant 
and important without any links whatsoever.  Google can't help 
much here (though it will find the key words).

It's easy to forget that Google is all of 8 years old.  With the 
amount of research going into search now, Google may have 
disappeared from our memories before it turns 16.

Joe Esposito

On 7/31/06, Martin Frank <MFrank@the-aps.org> wrote:
>
> Why do we need it?  That is the argument against a central PMC
> repository.  With the search technology that exists today, a
> central repository is unnecessary.  Let Google Scholar crawl
> journal sites as it already does to provide access to the
> literature, or invite NIH to extend PubMed/Medline backward with
> links in parallel with the journal legacy projects that are being
> undertaken, so the public and scientific community can readily
> find what they are looking.  Central is unnecessary, duplicative
> of distributed journal and institutional repository sites, and a
> diversion of research dollars unnecessarily.
>
> Martin Frank, Ph.D.
> Executive Director, American Physiological Society
> email: mfrank@the-aps.org
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Richard Feinman
> Sent: Fri 7/28/2006 7:27 PM
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: Central site for IR
>
> Wouldn't it be good to have a central site for IR supported by
> grants or all the institutions that wanted to use it as a
> repository?
>
> Richard D. Feinman, Co-editor-in-chief
> Nutrition & Metabolism ( http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com  /home )