Looking at Some Research Made Public by Google
January 10, 2020
The today Google is different from the yesterday Google. When I began work on the Google Legacy in 2002, I was able to locate Google presentations in PowerPoint form, Google papers posted on Google sub sites, and from Googlers who staffed booths at trade shows. Often these individuals would email me links to public information stored on obscure online urls.
Today figuring out where often obscure Google information is located is very difficult. Google is not so much secretive and really disorganized. Now that’s saying something because the early days of Google were comparable to predicting which way a squirrel would jump when a driver honked at a critter sitting in the road.
You can access some Google documents, often for a limited period of time, in the Google Research publication database. Today version of the service looks like this:
The service has about 6,000 papers posted. Some of these are full text; others are bibliographic citations. Some papers disappear.
In its present form, one can get some insight into what Google wants to expose to the public. Thus, the listing has a bit of marketing and PR spin to it. If you want to know about Alon Halevy’s Transformics technology, this collection is not for you. Ramanathan Guha has a single citation.
The good news is that the service is online. As you use the resource as a complement to other research, the limitations of the service become visible.
What’s Google philosophy of research? The Web site contains a link to the Google research philosophy. There you go. And I did not spot any advertising on the pages I examined…yet.
Stephen E Arnold, January 10, 2020
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
