This has potential. How would you filter out?

cool

Great idea. Create a knowledge base rather than a shopping mall. Maurreen has a good point .. how will you filter the products from the articles?

How do you make money if everything is free? I guessing you display ads here and there.

This would be really cool!

Problem is Google can add a filter to return "free results" rather easily if they wish to.

...subscription and payment of works is always essential...its really hard to have free lunch nowadays. Even ads are slice of life to make the site profitable...

How is the crowd compensated, and how good will they be at rating scholarly sources? It doesn't seem like this is the sort of thing crowdsourcing would work well for.

Interesting idea. Lots of differentiation required.

Thank you all for your feedback. You know this idea has been more a dream rather than a porject for benefit. I really agree with Kempton that google could do it, but that would in my benefit too!
About ratings, I think if Wikipedia information is acceptible, ratings here would be too. But of course this ratings would not be an alternative to reviewed magazines and conferences, but just a lower level of trustworthiness of the information.
Filtering would be a hard thing too. A good way maybe for the search engine to see if any page with a PDF,PS etc link would finish in a real document, not an html site. This is yet only a raw idea of course.

From a research perspective, do you really want to limit yourself to only free results? When you're doing a lit review, you need to be aware of the entire body of work even if you may not be able to afford to access it immediately. I see very little use for an academic search tool that arbitrarily limits results based on criteria that have nothing to do with the topic being searched.

You might be better off buying a database company, indexing their information, and making a search engine out of that. I think scanning the web for reliable information is a much bigger task than most of us think.

Good idea. Good luck.

Micco, you're right. A research without a good overview of all the information and research available about the topic (as much as possible) is not a research. But, when I search in google or any other general search engine for scholarly material, I am not looking for what Springer of IEEE have for me, because if they're available to me (e.g. through my university), I know such resources and would use their own search engines. Searching in the whole net is for things not found there, or things that are found there for some money, but are made available for free somewhere else too (e.g. by the author) and don't have access to.
So I think this idea really does something.
Thanks for your thoughts.

It it had a search engine even slightly less crap than the ones I had to use during my stints at Uni, I would use this!

hows it going with this?

why dont put a separate UI for Scholars page (grants and opportunities)...

it would be a hit to link you to almost all major learning institution!

you realize that most academic material is not free - you need subscriptions for printed or online copies, and there are copyright restrictions.