Measuring scientific impact through google

This is pretty interesting, specifically for physics, but no reason why it couldn't be applied on a wider scale.

Google could be a good way of measuring the "impact" of a particular scientific paper and might even be used to replace traditional citation indices, according to a new statistical analysis by physicists in the US. The researchers have found that the Google PageRank algorithm, which measures the relative importance of Web pages, can provide a systematic way to find important papers. The technique also uncovers scientific "gems" -- top papers overlooked by conventional searches...

...The algorithm involves launching many random "walkers" on the network of citations. Half the time, each walker jumps from a paper to one of its references (each with equal probability) and the rest of the time the walker jumps to random papers in the entire network. This hopping process is repeated until the populations of random walkers at each node becomes statistically constant. The average number of walkers at a given node in the network is the Google number.

The team found that the results from the PageRank technique are linearly correlated with those obtained from citation indices. In other words, highly cited papers also have high Google rank numbers. However, the team was surprised to find a few "outliers" -- exceptional papers that have anomalously high Google rank numbers compared with their citation rank.