Lately, I have noticed when I am doing a scientific search on Google,maybe an algorithm, resent research paper etc., I get less scientific sources than I normally would and more what I would consider "popular" sources. Has anyone else noticed this? Let's face it Google is pretty much my lens into the world. I am not near a major university library, so I do not have much choice.<p>I do not like this "pressure" to fit into Google's popular mold. Does anyone else have a better search engine for meaningful sources. I'm not saying Wikipedia, About, or Ehow are not creditable sources... hmm... yes yes, I am saying that. Any Help? Maybe something that indexes noncommercial sites only...
When I was a student I used CiteSeer all the time, but I guess it depends on the area of your research.<p><a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/" rel="nofollow">http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/</a>
Google search has been almost useless for me since they dropped implicit AND for implicit OR.<p>As in, the query [random trie] is now (random OR trie). The query [+random +trie] returns much better results (random AND trie).<p>I've seriously been considering starting a search engine just to get back to a ~2002 era Google level of usability.
I'm kind of curious: hypothetically imagine Google had super crazy search personalization... and knew when you were interested in scientific sources in a field versus just the wikipedia article. Would you be happier because your searches are great, or freaked out because you feel your privacy is being invaded.
I wonder if this might have something to do with it:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1082209" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1082209</a>