Google does its homework

The free scholar.google.com service enables users to search for scholarly literature like peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports.

Google said it has no plans to charge for the service, and no ads are currently appearing on the beta test.

The scholar service, which carries the tagline “Stand on the Shoulders of Giants”, accesses information from academic publishers, universities, professional societies and preprint repositories.

Just as with the firms web search, Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to the query, with relevance ranking based on 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.

Earlier this week, Google warned the market that tougher competition from the likes of MSN and Yahoo, is set to hit its sales growth.

The firm, which floated its shares earlier this year, said its rate of growth from the second quarter to the third may not be sustainable.

Last month, Google announced Net profit of £52m in the three months ending 30 September, on the back of strong advertising demand. Sales rose to $806m from $394m a year earlier.