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I always admired the fact that Americans have everything stored in national databases. There isn’t one name, figure, trend, that you can’t find somewhere online, if you have the right credentials.
Google just launched Google U.S. Government Search.
[Via Google Blog]
Actually they will be absolutely glad to have some databases. They will love to know who was registered as an inhabitant of New Orleans at the time of Katrina, who was in jail from those guys and so on. That would prevent the troubles that FEMA reported yesterday.
Now, if the USA has a strong need, that’s for soldiers. The self-offering slaves are running out. All went broke: the tricks with the money for college (nobody got a Nobel on that) or the tricks with the speeded citizenship (you can’t be a soldier unless you’re permanent resident, but, if you care, you can apply for citizenship after 3 years of residency instead of 5), the trick with fancy soldier-dressed guys at the most crowded spaces (they roam, useless, at the entrance of my subway, but some are even in Times Square in NYC).
So now the Military is working its way through a (new) marketing program. They needed to know the customer, and their only way was to buy the lists of teens that a private company was maintaining. Now, the company did that by buying from the schools the students’ list and the government agreed to pay billions for that. Now, although it’s paid by the public, the list is not public. More than that, the bureaucracy, simulating the concern for privacy, created a mechanism for any teen to be taken out of those recruitment lists. Thousands of students did just that, and now, supposedly, the lists are incomplete.
Google is just spilling their marketing garbage, as usual. There’s no fancy credential verification or whatever else you might think. What you see is just a variant of Google that limits itself to .GOV domains, which you could do by yourself by typing „site:*.gov” in the regular Google.
But do you think Google got some money from the US GOV. to build this stripped-down version of its own search engine?
I guess sometimes it’s easier to use one of these customized versions of Google. I saw that here in academia people tend to use Google Scholar, because it is actually something smarter, more like the book search, with citation graphs.
So getting back to your question, Google should not be receiving directly the incentive for this home page flavour. It’s enough if a small part of the US govern’t employess (who are counted by millions) use it, let’s say at work (which is half of their day), you get those people used, then they will spread the word etc.
The problem with Google Scholar and with other academia databases that give you only parts of the books or articles is that you tend to have a fragmented knowledge of the field.
I mean, very few researchers struggle to find the entire books.
Somebody told me last week that there’s no use in reading a whole book when doing a research, just the relevant chapters are enough.
Well, it’s not only the chapters issue, but some articles (indeed, the seminal ones) are more important in our work than any textbook. I started to notice that while I was in MS classes back in Bucharest and I had the enormous luck to have a foreign professor – his way was to give us articles and to try to make us comment them next week.