[Web4lib] Google Books a tease, not a useful tool, for serious research

Bill Drew bill.drew at gmail.com
Fri Jul 6 09:30:56 EDT 2007


These comments are all valid concerns but do seem a bit disingenuous from
people using an other free Google service, gmail.  To expect to get
definitive results from any Google search service is a bit over the top to
me.

-- 
Wilfred (Bill) Drew
Associate Librarian, Systems and Reference
Morrisville State College Library
E-mail: bill.drew at gmail.com
AOL Instant Messenger:BillDrew4
My Wiki: http://billdrew.pbwiki.com
Wireless Librarian: http://people.morrisville.edu/~drewwe/wireless/
Library: http://library.morrisville.edu/
SUNYConnect: http://www.sunyconnect.suny.edu/
My Blog:http://babyboomerlibrarian.blogspot.com
Al Gore quoting an African proverb: "If you want to go quickly, go alone.
But if you want to go far, go together."

On 7/6/07, Brian Gray <mindspiral at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As an engineering librarian, I have experience similar concerns with
> Google Patents. They limit the number of results returned on your
> search, so you never receive a complete set of patents. But, the real
> problem is that they do not say that anywhere which may be very
> harmful to new, first-time patent researchers.
>
> You can fake Google out by repeating the same patent search over and
> over again for smaller subsets of year, and combining the results. But
> as Rich pointed out, the results returned are not the same everytime.
>
> Brian Gray
> mindspiral at gmail.com
>
> On 7/6/07, Richard Wiggins <richard.wiggins at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Google seems to be paranoid about others mining their data.  Do they
> > actually change search behavior to limit the number of searches for a
> book?
> > If so it's obviously preventing reproducibility of research and even
> opening
> > the door to denial of service.
> _______________________________________________
> Web4lib mailing list
> Web4lib at webjunction.org
> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>


More information about the Web4lib mailing list