One thing I search for sometimes are code examples in a particular language. Search for something in C on Google and you end up with lots of stuff for C++, C#, etc... Github, with its large repository of public code, lets you filter by programming language, and is much better than Google in these cases.
Bing copies Google. DuckDuckGo returns different things than Google, but otherwise is a copy. There's no micro search engine for specific topics and sub-topics, outside of site-specific search. Market opportunity...
Dialog have been doing this over the internet for a long time. It's generalised search of the web I feel that is too expensive to tackle as yet.
We obviously need something better than the status quo here, but the status quo isn't as bad as it seems if you know how it works.
Quick hints: email the article author. They'll probably more than happy to send you an article and a quick summary worded for a lay audience (not to mention talking your ear off about their more recent work...) They're not worried about you not paying the publishers, they want to spread their work around.
Another trick is knowing people in academia. Maybe you have a friend who's doing graduate work, or lecturing. You could ask your old lecturers if you went to university and if the paper you're after is in their field. There are also communities like /r/scholar on Reddit, though I imagine some people are against that sort of thing.
This simply means that Google doesn't work very well for you, and I mean no offense, but what you are searching is a very, very small minority of search queries. Google still serves a crushing majority of people very well.
You are making the same mistake that Paul is making throughout his essay: he wants startups to build products for him and not for regular users. Seriously, email is actually a todo list? Come on, now.
BTW, Paul's article has a big #fail when he mentions code search as a possible idea; dude, we do have that and it's amazing (but unfortunately we recently shut it down; not sure if this will eventually resurface as part of some other product).
All that said, of course some company can always make an effort dedicated to a specialized niche that we are overlooking and beat Google Search in that niche; an excellent example of that is Wolfram Alpha. Still, not a big deal; to really "beat Google" you need a new general-purpose, full-Web search engine that beats Google's. Not impossible either, but the barrier to entry is simply colossal and it amazes me that people don't realize that and dream that it just takes some cool new idea or clever new algorithm to do that--we are not anymore in 1998, when Google, still working off a garage, started to beat the current top engines like Yahoo! and AltaVista.
Google, today, after all is a stock-holders company that is aimed to generate PROFITS, and maximize those. It should be kind of obvious that at some point they (as a company) will try to maximize cash coming in, and minimize going out (spent). Therefore, their product [search] is narrowed towards the ones who push the most obvious questions/search queries: what do they play in theatres, what car to buy, best lcd tv, pharmacy near me, etc. Thats probably 90% of search queries they getting. I say, as long as they work in this zone and make sure simple queries return the best results, they are winning - winning biggest chunk of market and smile on shareholders' faces.
That's because of the business model around funded research. Academic research funding is driven by a limited number of funding agencies being bombarded by huge numbers of proposals. One of the key metrics they use is how many peer reviewed journals has the author been accepted by. Those journals make money by charging access fees and by being semi-trusted gate keepers. Journals WANT it to be hard to access them online since they view the Internet publishing paradigm as a threat.
People have been trying to disrupt that business model since the mid 90s.
* "w pi" to search Wikipedia articles * "d pi" to search Dictionary.com definitions * "am pi" to search Amazon products * "map pie" to search Google Maps locations * "g pi" to search Google
and many others. :)
- No way to search for a scientific question and get a summary of the current scientific consensus or viewpoints on specific issues
- It's really hard to access academic journal articles online.
- Even when you can access journal articles, it's hard to know which ones to look in to answer your question. Sometimes it's hard to even know which field(s) your question falls under.
- Even if you vaguely know which field your question falls under, you don't necessarily know any of the vocabulary used by that field.
- No way to search by dependent and independent variables, confounding variables, etc.
- No way to sort articles by the quality of their methodology, the quality of the journal they were published in, the quality of the researchers, etc.
I know this isn't a product that more than 1% of the population would use, but if someone built it then maybe there are other things it could be used for.