The power of CiteSeer. To the x-th

CiteSeer seems to be back. That might not be very fresh news, but I discovered it only now. Well, discovery might be a strong word here: Google started to put citeseer links to the first places of my article searches.

A few years ago CiteSeer was like a miracle: a site that gives you full access all the articles you’ve stumbled upon, plus the articles that cite that article, plus the bibTeX entry to save typing. A miracle indeed. Not without errors (my .bib files were messed up for years due to copy-pasting those automatically generated bibTeX entries), but it was the best available. Up to around 2004, when it seriously started to look like abandoned. The server (and its mirrors) were often unavailable, and there was a time when the only proper way to find something was to google within the citeseer pages, citeseer’s own search being completely useless. Most importantly, the article database was not updated after 2004. Google Scholar became the way to go. I don’t particularly like Scholar, but the others are much, much worse. Does anyone use Rexa, Scirus, or Libra?

But now, CiteSeer strikes back, this time with an x-ponent to make it look more dangerous (which is said to express its neXt-generationness). It is no Scholar yet, but google searches now lead you to citeseerx pages. Seems like it just entered the beta phase, so there is hope we will see improvements soon.