All in all Google Scholar is really cool, their database and their methods of updating and aggregating data are really good, we don't want to diminish their success.
However, their interface hasn't really evolved, and I feel like their algorithm doesn't benefit from the algorithmic improvements on Google's main search engine at all (eg research questions, wikipedia snippets, taxonomy of field of studies...)
Given that 9 out of 10 researchers and PhD students use Google Scholar, allowing for a more open environment and greater customization of how articles are searched seems to be quite valuable.
I have some ideas about the google scholar algorithm, I think they too use a mix of semantic search, keyword search and heuristic weighting based on the citation graph.
But I don't think google will adopt our algorithm, this is why we created our app! Indeed, even using the terminology "seminal article" can be controversial, and Google is not there for that. Our application does not have the same goal: we have created a search engine optimized for literature reviews. We don't necessarily select the information that works best with the search, we try to offer a representative corpus.
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