July 2, 2003

From an IEEE online support email anouncement: "Google to index IEEE Xplore (IEEE to announce when Google indexing is complete)." This leads to an interesting thought. What if all STM journal publishers did the same thing? Would anyone bother subscribing to any A&I services anymore? Would they all just disappear? Certainly those that don't add a huge amount of value to the raw data (i.e. SciFinder) would quickly seem rather useless. At the same time, Google could also make a misstep by not realizing that it's dangerous to mix too much of the stuff on the open web with the scholarly content -- getting even more fantastically overwhelmingly huge search results will not endear them to serious researchers or even to impatient undergrads.

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