Google Now Targets Premium Content
November 2004

With its recent launch of Google Scholar, a search service covering academic content, such as peer-reviewed books, articles, papers, theses, preprints, abstracts and technical reports, Google made one of the most significant moves in its history. Moving beyond searches of the free web, Google has put itself squarely in the premium content world, an arena heretofore dominated by high-priced aggregators and secondary publishers whose mission has been helping users discover the existence of original content. Although Google Scholar is still in beta and has some growing up to do, its launch indicates that Google is committed to being the focal point for searches of both the free web and premium content sets.

In setting up the new service, Google recognized that it would need the cooperation of publishers, academic societies, universities, and pre-print repositories. The service also recognizes that scholars use information resources in particular ways that are different from ordinary web searching. As with standard Google, Google Scholar displays search results by relevancy, but it defines “relevancy” in ways that are particular to scholars: by the content of each article, the publication in which the article appeared, and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. In a bow to academics, Google Scholar analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online – a feature much valued by the academic and research communities in existing search products.

Google Scholar’s own explanatory web pages acknowledge “the debt we owe to all those in academia whose work has made Google itself a reality and we hope to make Google Scholar as useful to this community as possible.” Google is smart enough politically to know that it will need the continued support of publishers and the academic community if it is to gain access to a critical mass of premium content. Google Scholar is far from mature. According to the chatter on some academic listservs, the current beta version is uneven in its coverage in some disciplines.

Google Scholar helps users discover relevant content, but does not necessarily provide the full-text content itself. Users may need to subscribe to premium content to purchase content on a per-document basis. Google does not receive any compensation from subscriptions or pay-per-view sales of content. The service currently does not have any online advertisements accompanying the search results, but it does not appear to have any official policy prohibiting advertising at some point in the future. Google offers academic publishers, societies, universities, and other content providers a potentially enormous channel for making their content more discoverable, while keeping them solidly in control of their own content and advertising.