Web Search Engines "Made Simple"

[Sheryl Dwinell]

>Does anyone here have a good explanation of this that you use with your
>students/patrons/users when helping them with searches?

It's nice that someone has mentioned the patrons/students finally. I hate
these sort of questions from users because I feel like I don't have a
really good answer for them. I try to explain that it's a quirk of the
engine and try to explain as best I can how the engines work. But, heck,
I'm baffled sometimes by the results I get. In classes, it's particularly
frustrating to have worked out some practice searches. Double checked them
an hour before class time to make sure that what you tell the class will
happen, does happen. Then get into the class and, surprise, several folks
in different results with identical searches.

If we as "experts" are frustrated with these products, imagine what patrons
experience. In the classes we teach, lots of people come in with the
expectation that we're going to give them the magic key that will unlock
the secrets to searching the Web. They are either amused or chagrined to
find out that even we are frustrated when searching the Web, that even with
the most carefully constructed, well thought out search, we get bombarded
with way too many results, or 15-20 of the top results and none satisfy
your information needs. 

>From the feedback I've received, the most significant thing that class
participants come away with is a better sense of how imperfect these tools
are and that they are in no way like the library online catalog. Some
people believe that the search engines function like the catalog and they
can't figure out why they get so many irrelevant pages when they do a
'subject' search. Most people say they've never really looked at the
instructions and have no clue about phrase searching, boolean sets, and
other 'tricks'. Those are the ones who DO come to the class. It makes me
wonder how many of our students are using the Web for research and are
missing really good resources because they don't know how to construct a
good query. 

Someone wrote to the list saying that we should sorta stop our belly-achin'
and find the one that works best for us and go with it. Actually, I think
what we're doing is not only sharing our frustration, but sharing
information that can be useful to others on the list. I know that I've come
away with some good stuff. If we don't complain or we don't care about how
the engines perform, isn't it kind of giving in to what's available and yet
again being force fed products to use in our library that we have little
control over? I think it's great that Hotbot has a librarian on staff. Same
with Yahoo. Maybe if we channel our frustration in a positive way, we might
have a hand in designing better information retrieval products. There's so
much good stuff on the Web, and it would be really great if we could help
people find it consistently without having to beat their heads (our ours!)
against a wall in the process!

Sheryl Dwinell * Cataloger/DBM Librarian/Webmaster
Memorial Library * Marquette University
P.O. Box 3141 * Milwaukee, WI 53201-3141
414-288-3406 * dwinells at vms.csd.mu.edu