Google Debuts Scholarly Research
Google has publicly unveiled Scholar, a free beta service for academic research. Scholar pulls up relevant information from a combination of sources such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports.
When aggregating results, the Scholar search engine takes into account the full text of articles, author, publication, and frequency of citation in academic research.
The problem with researching online is that a great deal of primary source material is not yet accessible via the Web. In order to make up for this deficiency, Google searches through citations for offline literature that may be available at local libraries.
Scholar's search indexes are written in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.