Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in RefSeek is Google for Students and Scientists

Re: RefSeek is Google for Students and Scientists

GabeMac — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:18:56 -0000

Thanks for posting about this. I used it on my show and linked back, although I heard that not all the viewers actually think this is any good. And they were students of all things. Curious how it will fly.

anyway, here is the episode link:
http://dailybuzz.mobuzz.tv/...

Thanks and cheers!

Re: RefSeek is Google for Students and Scientists

Infonote — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 05:05:08 -0000

I cannot see the point as the same thing could easily be done with Google Custom Search.

Re: RefSeek is Google for Students and Scientists

Nabeela — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 06:09:42 -0000

i ts kinda gd well 4 studing all dah........................

Re: RefSeek is Google for Students and Scientists

Daniel Tunkelang — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:02:16 -0000

Matt, nice to see you in these parts. It does seem that http://www.google.com/searc... is the best comparable for http://www.refseek.com/sear....

Either way, I think that anyone who wants to turn the collective knowledge base into a global library would do well to read the library science research (e.g., folks like Tefko Saracevic, Nick Belkin, Marti Hearst, and Gary Marchionini) and support exploratory search.

Re: RefSeek is Google for Students and Scientists

Tim — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:38:00 -0000

If this site is so smart, how come it has not filtered the spam from its own comments?

Re: RefSeek is Google for Students and Scientists

Chris — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:43:09 -0000

Another tool to add to the arsenal of search engines.. good to see a new kid on the block that is NOT Cuil. I laughed when you said it was simpler than Google.. went to check out the site right away.. and hey, you're right. That alone should get them funding: "We've got an even more simple layout than Google!"

Re: RefSeek is Google for Students and Scientists

Supreet — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:14:56 -0000

MY LITMUS TEST
Result RefSeek : FAIL
I tried to something that may may be considered non scholastic 'SMS India' while Google Scholar returned results relating to SMS usertrends studies in India. RefSeek returned sites offering Love, Friendship sms' etc .. just because they had .org domain. Silly

Re: RefSeek is Google for Students and Scientists

Nick Young — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:59:11 -0000

Fantastic site. I though I would use this to see if it found my papers. It did, but it also found a paper by another author who has copied my work, and published it as their own. In this respect refseek is a fantastic tool, just to help to cut down on plagarism.

Re: RefSeek is Google for Students and Scientists

Daniel Tunkelang — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 08:33:10 -0000

Based on a few queries, I find the quality of RefSeek to be comparable to that of Google Scholar. It's hard to make a quantitative comparison without benchmarks.

But what neither of these interfaces support is exploration to learn more about a topic. They're fine for known-item search--highly specific queries where you know exact what you're looking for and it shows up in the top few hits. But for broader topical queries that return thousands of results, the best I can say is that at least RefSeek at least might point you to Wikipedia. Neither gives you an overview or organization of the results that might guide you to learn more about them.

Re: RefSeek is Google for Students and Scientists

tyfn — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 05:05:29 -0000

As a graduate student, I am interested to try out Refseek to search for relevant academic papers and links of interest. I absolutely love using google.scholar.com because I am able to find papers and journal articles of interests. For me to use Refseek, it would at a minimum have to have similar value to what I get from Google Scholar.