Google to Unveil Free Service for Academics

Google Inc. plans to unveil today a free service for academic researchers. Google Scholar allows Web surfers to search through dissertations, peer-reviewed papers and other scholarly literature.

Some of that information is already available through the Mountain View, Calif., company’s general search engine, but Google Scholar uses different criteria, such as the number of times a paper is cited by others, when delivering and ranking results.

The service, available on Google’s website, does not feature ads but may in the future, said Anurag Acharya, a Google engineer and former UC Santa Barbara computer science professor who developed the service.

Chris Gaither