Google has created a new search engine! Its called Google Scholar, and its purpose:

to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article’s author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.

Of course, this isn’t all that very revolutionary, as one reader of my source (GrandTextAuto) has noted:

This seems to be just an impoverished version of CiteSeer, which has been an invaluable research tool for many years. The only advantage I see is that it is backed by the Google web-crawler, which is probably more extensive than CiteSeer’s. This could prove to be significant, but CiteSeer is still more featureful, including abstracts, bibtex entries, backwards and forwards linkage of citations and a host of other things.

There is a more in-depth review available.

So, there you have it folks. The next time you need a high-fleutin’ research tool try Google Scholar or CiteSeer.