One interesting thing about Scholar is that it offers a parametric search on common meta-data across a common content type, unlike its consumer/public search.
Now consider these comments.
Bottom line is that Google is taking a brute force approach. But they have realized there still must be an element of trust, either though relationships with publishers, professional organizations, citation repositories, or by the very nature of the content (a postscript document rendered from LaTeX).
They know extracting meta-data is hard, and without trust, it could be garbage or leveraged to game the system (think SEO). But I suspect there is also a fair amount of 'not invented here' (NIH) culture in Google as well.
I'll mostly leave these comments unanchored as a catalyst, but offer the suggestion that if meta-data was available and trusted, it could significantly level the playing field for all search engines. Naive? Probably.
Regardless, search engines should be proactive around building trust between content providers and themselves, and to leverage that trust.
Looking deeper into a recent move, this may already be happening. But this is just idle speculation.
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