Google Scholar v. Metasearch 2007 November 7
John Price Wilkin from U Michigan has an interesting piece about Google Scholar versus Metasearch applications. I highly recommend that if you are interested in scholarly access to materials, you take a look at it.My thoughts are when it comes down to it is that metasearch is doomed to failure with the current model. Unless all the vendors agree on a single, robust, and open metasearch standard, it has no chance to get significantly better, and even if they did agree on the perfect standard, it is questionable how much better it would be because of network issues.
As John mentions, Google Scholar has its issues. However, it has one big strength over metasearch. No, not all of the money Google has. While that helps, the real advantage is local data storage. (Well, I guess with big pockets, you can get local data storage from some vendors, but I digress). Libraries, and vendors of databases that libraries purchase, need to work together to make the content easier to get too, and that means making the data available in local systems. I know some people are working on this, but it needs to come more quickly if we are to improve access to our patrons. If we don’t, they will go to Google (or Google Scholar) and not come to the library.