[Web4lib] Google Books a tease, not a useful tool, for serious research

[Brian Gray]

As an engineering librarian, I have experience similar concerns with
Google Patents. They limit the number of results returned on your
search, so you never receive a complete set of patents. But, the real
problem is that they do not say that anywhere which may be very
harmful to new, first-time patent researchers.

You can fake Google out by repeating the same patent search over and
over again for smaller subsets of year, and combining the results. But
as Rich pointed out, the results returned are not the same everytime.

Brian Gray
mindspiral at gmail.com

On 7/6/07, Richard Wiggins <richard.wiggins at gmail.com> wrote:
> Google seems to be paranoid about others mining their data.  Do they
> actually change search behavior to limit the number of searches for a book?
> If so it's obviously preventing reproducibility of research and even opening
> the door to denial of service.