[WEB4LIB] Re: Google Answers questions

[Patricia F Anderson]

Completely aside from "best bang for the buck" issues, what about ethics
and accountability? Google has unidentified folk asking questions which
are answered by unidentified "experts" in topics which carry potentially
serious results. I am thinking specifically of health, but the same issues
apply with making legal or financial decisions, for example. In addition,
in browsing the archives of questions, I have seen some questions that
just shrieked "Answer my homework question for me." :-) Not *quite*
plagiarism, eh?

Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich.edu

On Wed, 22 May 2002, Nancy Sosna Bohm wrote:

> And then there's the axiom of "you get what you pay for." Users are likely
> to assume that for $20.00 they can save a couple of hours of fruitless
> surfing or stack browsing and get a complete, accurate answer. It will be
> interesting to see if Google can in fact achieve such results and turn a
> profit.
>
> on 5/22/02 9:02 AM, Karen G. Schneider at kgs at bluehighways.com wrote:
> .. Google has the money to keep playing with this until they get it right
> or until they conclude it's a pointless $$-sink.  My questions are how much
> this service competes with free online services provided by libraries...
> time will tell...
>
>