Google up some research

Those of you looking for some serious research on the Internet will be delighted to learn about Google Research Scholar, a new and free offering from the search giant. It works like any other Google search, except that the results are limited to serious scholarly journals indexed by Google, and the results pages feature no advertising at all - Google considers this its gift to the research world, apparently, whose insights have benefited the company.

Of course, all these hits would be delivered in a regular old Google search - the difference is that Google has figured out how to identify scholarly items and weed out the casual items.

It seems to be fairly comprehensive. I tried a few obscure terms from my field of expertise - "perichoreisis," "satis est," "confessio augustana" and "deuteronomistic" - and Google Research Scholar found entries for each item.

I'm impressed enough to bookmark it. If research is your thing, you would do well to do the same.

Correction: I originally called the service "Google Research." Although a research tool, the service is actually named "Google Scholar."