Through Google.Dirson.com I just found out about Google Scholar, a new service of Google destined only to the search of academic and scientific material. In my first tests, I have to admit that it found a large number of very interesting material, but it’s not too clear the differences between free and pay-for-access material -for instance, the ones in Ingenta.

One of the most interesting things of Scholar Google is the possibility to access quickly to working papers that refer to an article that interests us. This way, maybe we cannot download the text we’re looking for -when they’re not free, it can get a little expensive for some of us- but at least we can read other authors that cite the text. Sounds a little third-world, but it can be a solution for our poor-in-dollars wallets.

We have to recognize, Google is taking lots of initiatives around the search theme. Of course, we can’t help to ask ourselves if it’s ok for a single company to have such power on the search field in the Internet.