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[link to it] 24Nov04 : Google as shill for fee based services

I was consoling a friend yesterday who is an expert in online and database searching. "Everyone wants to hear about Google" he said "my job is becoming all Google all the time" I paraphrase, but we all know how it is. I've become increasingly leery of Google lately as they form more and more partnerships with fee-based publishers and vendors and also index their sites for Google's master index. Can anyone explain to me why a Google search for jessamyn ineligible academy [backstory] nets me five results, one of which is a PDF, with no accompanying "show as HTML" link, and flavortext that is from the article itself [or its abstract] that is not available via the linked site except through a subscription? I'm sure there's an obvious explanation -- like maybe the article was online for free and now it's not -- but why no HTML link, and where did that text come from if it's not in the linked page? I sent Google a note and trolled their FAQ for details, but all I can deterrmine is that, according to the current FAQ, Google isn't supposed to do that. I'd love to hear some reasons why it does.

Note from a reader, apparently Google Scholar may crawl full text, and show the abstract in the results, even if it only allows access to a citation. Is it too much to ask that Google have a way to avoid these fee-based results, or mark them somehow? I know how to remove PDFs from my search results, but not how to remove all non-full test sources. Even my library can do that. Then again, they're not trying to make money off of their search results.

About Google Scholar crawling the full text from certain publisher sites -- here's what a Google spokesperson told us today: "...where we have permission to crawl a doc we will do so, but will only show an abstract."

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