Re: access to self archive via google scholar

From: Leslie Carr <lac_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2006 23:56:45 +0100

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On 22 Oct 2006, at 22:42, Walker,Thomas J wrote:

> Those starting an IR should not expect Google to quickly harvest or to
> logically rank the journal articles posted on the new IR. This is
> based
> on my recent experience with helping the Florida Center for Library
> Automation (FCLA) in their efforts to test the IR waters with
> ScholArchive (http://eprints.fcla.edu/ ), a pilot IR that is
> focused on
> the scholarly output of the faculty and graduate students of the
> University of Florida's Department of Entomology and Nematology.


It is irksome that those tools we imagine to be most aligned to the
Open Access paradigm do not work in the way that we wish! I wonder
how different sites get different patterns of traffic because of the
way that they are harvested by the various search engines. I have no
insider knowledge as to how Google Scholar works, but I am interested
to see if we can get some global triangulation on this issue.

By way of illustration, I list below a summary of the two months of
search engine referals to eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk, representing just
over 30K downloads. It shows that 3/4 of all search engine referals
come from plain old Google vs 1/7 from Google Scholar and 1/10 from
the rest. Perhaps that breakdown is of all repositories, or perhaps
the figures vary from repository to repository depending on Google-
Scholar-specific criteria.

If you run a repository, please you email me (lac_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk)
with a breakdown of the search engine referals to your site and I
will summarise the result for the list.

76.05% Google
15.25% Google Scholar
4.93% Yahoo
1.37% Ask Jeeves
1.03% Unknown search engines
0.53% AOL
0.27% MSN
0.16% AltaVista
0.08% Netscape
0.05% Tiscali
0.05% Earth Link
0.04% AllTheWeb
0.03% Seznam
0.02% Search.com
0.02% Mamma
0.02% ix quick
0.01% Hotbot
0.01% Excite
0.01% Google (Images)
0.01% Baidu
0.01% searchy.co.uk
0.01% Yandex
0.01% Overture
0.01% Lycos
0.01% Arianna
0.01% AOL (de)
0.00% WISENut
0.00% Voila
0.00% Spray
0.00% Kvasir
0.00% BBC
0.00% Toile du QuÃ^Èbec
0.00% MetaCrawler (Metamoteur)
0.00% Froogle (Google)
--
Les Carr
Received on Mon Oct 23 2006 - 11:05:07 BST

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