As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google's "Did you mean?" feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time. For example, if you type "bass," Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include "bass fishing" or "bass guitar." Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like "progr," Google Suggest might offer you refinements like "programming," "programming languages," "progesterone," or "progressive." You can choose one by scrolling up or down the list with the arrow keys or mouse.
Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.
3. Coming soon...Google Print Library
According to The Register
Google will co-operate in scanning and digitizing works with major academic libraries and make them searchable. The results will be displayed using Google Print - which uses DRM to restrict the viewing and printing of copyright material - and display links to either commercial booksellers such as Amazon.com or, using Open Worldcat metadata, provide information where to find it at your local library. Initial partners include Harvard, with 15 million books, Oxford's Bodleian Library, Stanford and Michigan University, where the scanning of seven million books is expected to take six years. Google won't at first offer advertisements on Print Library, although there's plenty of scope for this to change. For example: Do you want fries with your burgher?
4. Gmail
Some of us have been using Gmail for the past few months. The technology behind it is great. One gigabyte of storage is adequate. The only problem is that it's still in beta and invitation-only...but if you are a reader of The Filter^, you might get an invitation! The Filter^ has four Gmail accounts to give away this Christmas. All you have to do is to leave a comment with an argument to prove the existence of God (well, it's Christmas after all!). It can be amusing or technical - Anthony and I will judge the best four entries and send out the invitations. Merry Christmas!
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