> If anything, my interest in a document may be inversely proportional to the citation count.

This makes little sense to me. The citation count gives you an idea of what others are looking at and building upon. As far as I’ve seen, having a low citation count isn’t an uncommon phenomena, but having a high citation count is. In terms of information gained while triaging papers to read, a low citation count gives you almost no information.

Since it trivially does what you want with one click, and you’re not the audience, why the bizarre hatred of something you don’t understand?

It works great for its audience, likely better than any other product. Do you think your desire for rare outweighs the masses that don’t? If you want rare, why even use a tool designed for relevant? Go dig through the stacks at your favorite old library, bookstore, cellar, wherever.

I’d suspect if you were handed random low citation count articles you’d soon find they are not gems. They’re not cited for a reason.

Heck, want low citation count items? Go find a list of journal rankings (well crap, more rankings…) in the field you’re interested in, take the lowest rated ones, and go mine those crap journals for gems. Voila! Problem solved.

And I bet you find why they’re low ranked searching for gems in slop.

sci-hub hasn't been updated in 4 years and the sources for annas-archive like nexus-stc are seriously hit or miss (depends on the field).

I think access to research shouldn't be a luxury or dependent on where you study

I believe NIH's directive that all intramural and extramural research must be published OA has helped move things in that direction quite a lot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access (I assume)

i believe they paused due to an indian court injunction and the case was heard this year, does anyone know any update?

I use a decade-old NUC with plenty of RAM as a daily driver. It doesn't struggle with anything except MS Teams. It can churn through Zoom or Meet calls while compiling code. Teams is a bloated mess that makes the fans spin at max RPM.

It's crazy I can boot a kernel, with an entire graphics and network stack, X and a terminal in less than 200 MB but then the Teams webapp uses a massive amount of resources and grinds everything else to a halt.

Word 365 also becomes incredibly laggy on long documents with tons of comments, whereas Google Docs is just fine. But, apparently, this is also a thing on modern hardware. I guess these days Microsoft has little attention to detail.

That issue got resolved in a few days [1] -- and for each and every one of these extremely rare events at Google, you'll find similar ones at MS.

I am referring to robustness at scale and every day: Google released auto-save years before MS. MS pales in comparison in the UX.

Note: I have no vested interest in Google, not ex-googler, etc.

[1] https://support.google.com/drive/thread/245861992/drive-for-...

I’m shocked people are managing incidence response over a google dock… what happened to emailing things to people?

Yeah. Fastmail masked addresses are random. The best you can do is guess that an address might be masked, due to it not being johnsmith@fastmail.com, but it provides no information about your real email address.

Or just knows about this Gmail trick (it's been 20 years already) and sends spam to your real mailbox.

Actually, I am surprised _any_ spammy website these days would even honor the part after the +, and not just directly send to the real mailbox name.

Not everyone's cup of tea, but quite nice if one can afford it: I have my personal domain and a catch-all inbox. So if I want to register at acme-co.xyz I will just use acmecoxyz@my-domain.tld

Maybe I should start using random words though? Wonder if someone will go bananas seeing their brand's name on my domain.

dots are ignored, can filter by john.doe@gmail.com

not sure about capital letters

I run mail servers for myself, a couple of side projects, and some friends and family. A double-digit percentage of all spam caught by my filters is from Google's mail servers, not just forged @gmail.com addresses.

Of the "too big to block outright" spam senders, behind Twilio Sendgrid and Weebly, Google is currently #3. Amazon is a close #4. None of the top four currently have useful abuse reporting mechanisms... Sendgrid used to be OK, but they no longer seem to take any action. Google doesn't even accept abuse reports, which is ironic because "does not accept or act upon abuse reports" is criteria for being blocked by Google.

Most spam from Google is fake invoices and 419 scams. This is trivially filtered on my end, which makes it perplexing Google doesn't choose to do so. I can guarantee that exactly 0% of Gmail users sending out renewal invoices for "N0rton Anti-Virus" are legitimate.

The Spam I get from "gmail" and ends up in my spam folder is spoofed. The Spam I get from gmail and ends up in my inbox is from gmail. Spammers will mass-create accounts and mass-sell them to spammers.

I would hope google has DKIM and SPF set.

At one point I contributed quite a bit to google maps, because it was the primary map system I was using at the time. Had I been using an OSM-based system, I would have made contributions there instead.

I don't see why NIH affects anything. They're google products now. And as a further point: do you think Android and YouTube have the same codebases as they did when they were acquired? Of course not.

>which is Google's primary product

Which used to be Google's primary product, way waaaay back when. Their primary product now is advertising, and has been for a very long time.

Was this change ever logged or noted some way? Or did it just show up one day?

Reader usage was declining because the application was not being developed. The other reason they mentioned is that it would have required a lot of work to rewrite the app to be consistent with the new user data policies being put into place.

They are substantially smaller in coverage, but have higher quality in my experience. Remarkably, they are also willing to correct their data if you notify them. This of course in is stark contrast to Google Scholar where the metadata of papers is frequently wildly inaccurate. On top of this, Semantic Scholar shares their underlying data (although you need to request an API key). Overall, they have been growing slowly and steadily over the years and I have a lot of respect for what their team is doing for researchers such as myself.

Now for the less great.

They are pushing the concept of "Highly Influential Citations" [1] as their default metric, which to the best of my knowledge is based on a singular workshop publication that produced a classifier trained on about 500 training samples to classify citations. I am a very harsh critic of any metrics for scientific impact. But this is just utter madness. Guaranteeing that this metric is not grossly misleading is nearly impossible and it feels like the only reason they picked it is because Etzioni (AI2 head) is the last author of the workshop paper. It should have been at best a novelty metric and certainly not the default one.

[1]: https://webflow.semanticscholar.org/faq/influential-citation...

Recently, they introduced their Semantic Reader functionality and are now pushing it as a default way to access PDFs on the website. Forcing you to click on a drop down to access plain PDFs. It may or may not be a great tool, but it feels somewhat obvious that they are attempting to use shady patterns to push you in the direction they want.

Lastly, they have started using Google Analytics. Which is not great, but I can understand why they go for the industry default.

Overall, I use them nearly daily and they are the best offering out there for my area of research. Although, I at times feel tempted to grab the data and create an alternative (simpler) frontend with fewer distractions and "modern" web nonsense.

Semantic Scholar's search is pretty good, but there are also a variety of other (paid) projects that expand on its API. Look at tools like Scite and LitMaps for what's possible with the semantic scholar dataset.

As for coverage, I think it focuses more on the life sciences, but I'm not positive about that.