An interesting piece over at the Grauniad suggests that academic search engines (which have been, at points, the very bane of my life) are ‘less mediocre’ than Google but lack user-friendliness.
Scores of academic search engines provide a heavyweight alternative to the commercial ones and work against what Brighton University’s professor of media– Tara Brabazon has termed “the Google effect” — a tendency towards mediocrity.
Yeah, maybe. But Google will often pull up the pages of academics who put pre-prints of their papers online, saving us the rigmarole of trying to get a full text version of a paper via a university library only to hit that ‘computer says no’ message at the end.
Via Academia’s big guns fight ‘Google effect’ | | EducationGuardian.co.uk