Changes to Google Scholar
scholar.googleblog.com
scholar.googleblog.com
"Cite" and "Save" are self-explanatory, icons are not. They're also unusual on a line with plenty of other text (which no doubt they would now decide to "iconify" in the future...)
I've seen enough of this trend that phrases like "cleaner look" make me think of an empty room left behind by someone who decided to throw away everything you need --- bland and useless. It's beyond stupid.
I agree that text is better than an icons, especlally the misleading "quote" icon that actually means "cite" -- so thank heavens for tooltips (which presumably work only on desktop).
We could search back then. It was a paid service, involved a human who actually did the searches as a service, and took several days to get you your results. You did contact them online, so there's that!
But, today, a gripe is needing to hover over an icon to read the tooltip. That is truly awesome, in every sense of the word.
As an aside, when people say that the Internet was better back before commercialization, they are telling horrible lies. No, no it was not. It was pretty horrible and computers pretty much sucked. The hardware, network, and content are much better today.
Well, I do understand actually. It is about ads revenue. Fuck that. I wish this ecosystem finally dies.
You can use userscripts and CSS in the browser, and/or rewriting MITM proxies (when the browser is not as featureful or easy to control), although personally the combination of usefulness and annoyance has to be quite high before I start trying to restyle a site --- not very many qualify.
CSS completely off also tends to produce good results, but usually not for "app-ish" pages.
Nevertheless, I feel like this is one of these half-hearted Google projects and doesn't fully live up to its potential. This relatively subtle UI change is a good example that they don't seem to care too much about taking it further. I just pray Google doesn't shut it down one day.
Presumably you'd be happier if the UI changed from week to week?
Scholar too felt ignored like its a bastard child, but this new update looks promising, not in term of their changes, but due to the fact that this implies they haven't boxed it yet. Also, they haven't "revamped" the search, so I'm not worried about the core functionality.
Most likely this behavior stems from the fact that this service doesn't generate revenues for them (I'm assuming so, please correct me if I'm wrong). If so, then how does a small company keep up its own academic search portal?: Semantic Scholar by Allen.
Considering that there are quite a few researchers working at Google, I can imagine that the fact that they have this tool available to them indirectly causes some revenue. (And also, goodwill in the academic community, i.e. a community of potential future employees.)
Full disclosure: I worked on Semantic Scholar.
This small change would be more welcome that any other UI refreshment, I guarantee it.
It also seems that Google has about 20 different blogging outlets. Shouldn't they all be on blog.google by now?
The result counts are usually highly inflated and approximate anyway (i.e. can you eventually actually get all 3M+ results?), so perhaps they don't mean all that much.
The best explanation for that anomaly, which is more of an excuse, is that they don't want to spend computing power sorting all the results.
Nevermind the fact that sorting by date is probably much easier than computing "relevance" and sorting by that...
No more needing to navigate publisher websites, or searching for an obscure article.
Would be cool to have a way to cite any url directly to EndNote.
It's really a shame that no university library consortium has tried to build this themselves.
I know arXiv does this, but it's in such an unreadable format that it makes me just want to read it on the site.
2. Anyone know where to get my hands on a data set of papers with citations in an easy to parse format? Would like to do some analysis