Losing Google Would Hit Chinese Science Hard 161
An anonymous reader writes to share recent statements by Chinese scientists that indicate troubled waters ahead if Google were to pull out of China. "More than three-quarters of scientists in China use the search engine Google as a primary research tool and say their work would be significantly hampered if they were to lose it, a survey showed on Wednesday. In the survey, 84 percent said losing Google would 'somewhat or significantly' hamper their research and 78 percent said international collaborations would be affected. 'Research without Google would be like life without electricity,' one Chinese scientist said in the survey, which asked more than 700 scientists for their views."
Google Scholar (Score:5, Informative)
My initial reaction to this was "what, they don't have other search engines on the Internet?" I mean, I use Google myself, and I'm quite happy with it, but if it disappeared tomorrow I'd just start using something else.
Then I (gasp!) read TFA, which I know many (most?) of you won't do, so I'll fill you in on the part that the summary missed. The issue here isn't so much that they fear losing Google, but that they fear losing Google Scholar, which, as far as I can tell (although I've never used it), has no free (as in beer) alternatives.
Re:"I hope you have the time of your life"- Green (Score:2, Informative)
Nothing is stopping the Chinese from building their own search engine.
ummm, Baidu [wikipedia.org]?
Nature Conducted the Survey (Score:5, Informative)
Link is to an article that does not name who did the "survey." For all we know the whole thing was made up.
I believe the Science journal Nature did the survey. Here's the original article [nature.com] and a breakdown of the survey [nature.com]. Sample size looked to be 784.
Re:Being IN China necessary? (Score:5, Informative)
By "censored," you mean blocked. Google's ability to operate in China was dependent on censoring all search results to make sure nothing slipped out. Trying to do that kind of content filtering on the national firewall level would be impractical. Where the physical data centers are located is almosta complete non-issue. It's whether or not Google will restrict their content offerings to Chinese central government standards.
Re:"I hope you have the time of your life"- Green (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Google Scholar (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Being IN China necessary? (Score:5, Informative)
Its not 'pulling out of china' in the sense of not having an office there.
Its pulling out of china in the sense of removing all ties with the government, stopping censoring, pulling offices back out of the country, and then waiting for China to blacklist them. Possibly blacklisting china's address space themselves if the chinese government doesn't get around to it fast enough to prove the point.
Re:Google Scholar (Score:1, Informative)
For bio researchers PubMed is far better.
If your paper is not here, you don't exist as a researcher in any bio-med field.
I'm thinking there should be others for other fields.
Re:Google Scholar (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Rigged survey (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Google Scholar (Score:1, Informative)
ISI Web of Knowledge [isiknowledge.com] is fairly comprehensive, but it isn't free. Many university libraries pay for it though.
Re:Google Scholar (Score:4, Informative)
> Google Scholar is the most comprehensive index of scholarly articles in the world, period.
You can't possibly know that, as Google doesn't tell us exactly what's covered by GS.
> Not only are there no free alternatives, there are no alternatives at all.
Wrong. The Web of Knowledge and Scopus (commercial) and Scirus (free) are perfectly valid alternatives. Furthermore, a number of studies in various fields have shown that all of these tools, as well as GS, usually return a number of hits that were not found by the others (again, including GS). Therefore, they can always be seen as complementing each other.
What you cound argue, on another hand, is that GS offers the best quality/price ratio. I for one would accept that.
Re:China, research giant... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:China, research giant... (Score:3, Informative)