Posts Tagged: google

Hacks / Research / Software — 5 Comments
1
Mar 09

Citation Searching in Google Scholar

One of my favorite features in Google Scholar is its “cited by” function.  Cited by allows you to see all of the items in Google Scholar that cite the pulbication you were searching for.  In comparison to Web of Science, GS has much greater recall, which is useful when you’re investigating a new topic.

The problem with GS cited by is that there is no easy means for searching within the results.  This is fine if your publication is cited only a few times and you can eyeball the results.  But as the citation count scales up, being able to search within the results becomes pretty important.

The good news is that you can search within GS cited by, it just requires a little URL hacking.  In my case, I was looking for publications about web surveys that cite the Reeves and Nass book “The Media Equation.”  We’ll do this step by step:

  1. Open up GS, and search for “The Media Equation“
  2. The first result is the Reeves and Nass book.  Click on the “Cited by 1598” link.
  3. The URL will look something like this:

    http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=50&hl=en&lr=&cites=12773235514158955901

    You will want to select that list bit, the “&cites=12773235514158955901″.

  4. Now, open up GS in a new tab and run a search for “Web Survey.”
  5. Finally, paste the “&cites=12773235514158955901″ onto the end Web Survey URL, so it looks something like this:

    http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=50&hl=en&lr=&q=Web+Survey&btnG=Search&cites=12773235514158955901

  6. Voila!  You’ve found the 337 publications matching Web Surveys that cite the Reeves and Nass book.  The first one looks like a very promising publication from some highly regarded methodologists.  Win!

”gsresults”

I was unable to run a comparison in the WoS database as it doesn’t seem to know about the Reeves and Nass book.  Are there any other places you use for Cited By searches (i.e. other databases, vendors, search engine hacks)?  And if there is some easy way to do this search in the GS interface, please let me know.  I’ve read the advanced searching docs and researched this, but it doesn’t appear there is a simple way to search within citations.

Hacks / Research / Software — 2 Comments
2
Dec 08

Hacking Google Scholar

If you connect to Google Scholar through a proxy (for example, through your library’s proxy), you’ll find that GS is unable to remember your preference settings.  Although Google seems to forget my preferences far too often, in the case of Google Scholar it isn’t their fault.  When you connect through a proxy you appear to Google as a different user every time, and until preferences are tied to your Google account (and not a session/cookie), Google is simply unable to remember them.

To “solve” this problem, I’ve found that you can set a bookmark that will set your preferences each time it is clicked.  While this doesn’t solve the problem of Google forgetting preferences between sessions, it will save you the time and effort of having to reset your preferences each time.  You will need to custom-craft your bookmark.  Here’s mine:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_setprefs?num=50&scis=yes&scisf=4&submit=Save+Preferences

As you can see, in with I’m passing some options to “scholar_setprefs” – i.e. the mechanism that sets your Google Scholar preferences.  I’m manipulating two options, Number of Results (num=50) and Bibliography manager (scis=yes&scisf=4).  I could also directly manipulate the interface and search language, library links, and if the results opened new windows or not (I don’t because I’m happy with the GS defaults).

The options accept a range of values, which I’ll describe briefly:

Number of results (num), accepts:

  • 10
  • 20
  • 30
  • 50
  • 100

If you’d like 100 results to be displayed, you’d change the url so that num=100.

Bibliography manager (scis=yes&scisf=4).  Google Scholar supports a number of different export formats, and to change their default, you’ll need to change the scisf value.  Here are the corresponding values:

  • 4 (Bibtex)
  • 3 (EndNote)
  • 2 (RefMan)
  • 1 (RefWorks)
  • 5 (WenXianWang)

If you’re a RefWorks user, you’d change the string so that it looked like this scis=yes&scisf=1.

Putting it all together, if you’re a RefWorks user who wants 100 results displayed, you’d set your bookmark as follows:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_setprefs?num=100&scis=yes&scisf=1&submit=Save+Preferences

Finally, if you’re accessing GS through your library proxy, you’ll need to add the proxy information into the URL. In the case of UNC we place the proxy information directly in the url. Therefore, my proxied bookmark looks like this:

http://scholar.google.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/scholar_setprefs?num=50&scis=yes&scisf=4&submit=Save+Preferences

As you can see, I’ve added .libproxy.lib.unc.edu to the beginning of the URL. This will vary by library, so you’ll want to look at other proxied URL’s at your institution to get a feel for where the proxy information goes.  As I noted above, there are a bunch of other options you can change directly. If you’d like to change those, simply view the source of the Google Scholar preferences page, look for the option and value pairs in the form, and tack them into the URL (making sure to add & before the option/value pair).

Noticed / Thoughts — 5 Comments
24
Nov 08

Serious Privacy Issues with Google SearchWiki

David Weinberger highlights a stunning oversight by Google’s SearchWiki team (bold mine):

[T]he results page shows you the nicknames of other users who have voted the page up. So, now the whole world will see that “dweinberger” not only searched for “Angelina Jolie” but thumbs-upped the page of closeups of her tattoos? Guess who just changed his nickname to something less identifiable! This is a feature without value — the list of names isn’t clickable or complete or tell you how many people voted it up — unless you recognize someone’s nickname, in which case it has negative value.

In addition, Google has made a curious decision in requiring all SearchWiki “notes” to be public.  That is, if you want to take advantage of SearchWiki and leave yourself a note, all other SearchWiki members will be able to read it.  This is broken on many levels.  Obviously, there are privacy concerns – you may want to leave a note, but do you really want all other Google users to be able to read it?  And beyond privacy, what about utility.  Let’s say you want to leave yourself a note “To get to the policy page, click on About, and then Policies.”  Since you can only place that note publicly, it will quickly get lost in the sea of other Google users notes.

Considering Google’s zero-day rollout of SearchWiki into their main search property, the lack of HCI and Privacy consideration that went into the product is shocking.  There’s no opt-out.  All comments are forced public.  There’s no way to change your handle.  There’s no way to leave yourself a privacy-enhancing private note. Instead of rolling this feature out fully-baked (opt-in/out, with critical functionality), Google has rolled a half-baked product to all users and forced them through this curious funnel.

Last year Starbucks radically changed its business model by returning the company to its roots.  I don’t know how well that effort has worked, but I liked the concept.  Using the economic downturn as an excuse, perhaps its time for Google to do the same?

Hacks — 4 Comments
22
Nov 08

Fixing Google with Adblock Plus

TechCrunch is right – Google, It Wasn’t Broke.  Google has rolled personalization at the item level into search, cluttering their elegant interface.  As far as I can tell, this affects all users who are logged in with a Google account (i.e. Gmail, etc), and there’s no way to opt out.  Now, I’m not against personalization – if you want it.  And while it appears there’s no way to opt out, you can make the cluttering icons disappear with Adblock plus (Firefox users).  To make the buttons and conversation icon disappear, add the following “element hiding rules” to Adblock Plus:

google.com#BUTTON(class=wci)
google.com#BUTTON(class=w10)
google.com#BUTTON(class=w20)

Voila, Google back to normal.

Update: TechCrunch reports that Google may be rolling this feature back, and it reports on a Greasemonkey script that accomplishes the same results as this Adblock Plus filter.  I’m not a Greasemonkey user so I’m not able to verify.

Hacks / Noticed — No Comments
15
Sep 08

Hacking Unit Structures: Google Suggest and iTunes 8

Two tips that have made my life better in the past day:

I can’t stand Google suggest.  Even though I’ve set the preference to make it go away 1,000 times, it keeps returning.  I think something with Firefox and new tabs makes Google forget your preference.  To fix this permanently, set your Google bookmark as follows:

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0&hl=en

Every time you load Google in a new tab, you’ll reset the preference with your bookmark.  If you call up Google by actually typing in the URL – then you’re out of luck (unless, of course, you want to type the preceding URL).

Next, the new iTunes (8) has removed the preference setting that allows you to remove the pesky “link to iTunes store” arrows that appear next to songs.  To remove, follow Tech-recipe’s formula: open up a terminal and paste in the preference as follows:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

Restart iTunes, and the links go away.

Noticed / Research — 2 Comments
11
Sep 08

Search, Lifestreaming and Outsourcing

Google’s Marisa Mayer has written a post about the future of search.  There are a lot of non-trivial problems in some of the scenarios she describes, but I see others – such as location-assisted search – as very useful next steps.  The real point here is that our metaphors of search will change; right now, we use text to sum our anomalous knowledge state, but in the future our location, or relative position in a social network, or even everyday analytics like the outside temparature may guide and inform our searches.  The real next steps in search are the integration and vectoring of search using such data.  To experience this, do a location-based search in Google maps on the iPhone – this is a very early snippet of the future.

The WaPo writes about Lifestreaming (or more appropriately, Datastreaming).  This article focuses on everyday data collection and the tools we use to collect and share such data.  I see Datastreaming as the vanguard of ubiquitous computing.  That is, ubicomp isn’t Bell’s SenseCam, but rather the collection of streams we choose to share (as well as those recorded about us).  Server logs, surveillance cameras, datastreams, lifestreams – these are the “streams” we should be building ubicomp applications to use and support (rather than the traditional paradigm of us integrating ubicomp into our lives).  Chris Messina, featured in the article, delivers another fantastic blog entry, providing a little more background on the article.

Finally, Andy Baio recounts turning to Mechanical Turk to analyze Girl Talk’s new album.  Turking research is an emergent trend – Brynn Evans recently ran a study, and Ed Chi’s group had a CHI paper on MT methods.  I’m sure there are plenty more examples.

Noticed / Software / Thoughts — 3 Comments
3
Sep 08

Chrome’s reconfiguration of the web’s geography

I’ve really enjoyed Chris Messina’s two recent posts on Chrome.  His background (Mozilla, Flock) and experience thinking about next generation UI’s and UE’s is on fine display; I particularly enjoy his reconcpetualization of the browser and its experience.

Factory City: Google Chrome and the future of browsers

Factory City: Musings on Chrome, the rebirth of the location bar and privacy in the cloud

In the second, more recent post, Chris discusses the cognitive break inherent in Chrome’s vision of the web.  In removing the URL bar in favor of a single search interface, the web transforms from one spatially and locationally grounded (in URL’s, permalinks and bookmarks) to a fully-mediated, amorphous zone of information.  In this new web, there are no wrong answers or incorrect URL’s, because the algorithm always has information relevant to the intent of our information need.

As Messina notes, the tradeoff is such “that our fundamental notions and expectations of privacy on the web have to change or will be changed for us. Either we do without tools that augment our cognitive faculties or we embrace them, and in so doing, shim open a window on our behaviors and our habits so that computers, computing environments and web service agents can become more predictive and responsive to them, and in so doing, serve us better.”

That is, in embracing the mediated web, we trade (to some extent) our agency, any sense of privacy, and most importantly, our extant strategies of finding and reminding for new, less conceptually transparent ones.  To embrace the web in Chrome’s model, we must embrace the algorithm, and essentially invite it into our minds.  This new lens is all-or-nothing, and it casts away our strategies of past, those operationalized in pre-web design patterns.

On one hand, one might be able to argue that the web is so vast that inviting the algorithm home might make sense.  Perhaps it is better to browse with Google on your shoulder, assisting your navigation and selecting your best information choices.  Where I run into difficulty with this model is that Google is placed at a meta-layer above the web; it becomes the lens through which the web is experienced.  This model is troubling at many levels, but I particularly resent the idea the web should be mediated.  Slightly repurposing JPB’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Of course, this isn’t a question of morals; the web is a market, and there will always be a choice to opt-out or not participate in Google or anyone else’s schemes.  The gray area emerges when we consider Google’s place in the market, and the sheer power they exert in the configuration of consumer preferences.  Thinking as an educator – we lament the so-called death of the book.  In five years, will we lament the death of the URL, in an age in which all authority is conferred through the end-product of a citation-based algorithm?

All of this comes with a grain of salt.  Personally, I believe our current spatial metaphors of the web will exist for the imaginable future.  As revolutionary as these ideas seem, we change slowly, and the browsing and searching patterns of billions of web users are already well-established.  Further, this sort of change is essential – we’re constantly reconfiguring the web and our experience of the web – I just question how much we need to do that with Google looking over our shoulder.

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