[Web4lib] Another Google question

[Patricia F Anderson]

Bravo, Roy! Thank you. I teach a class on advanced Internet searching, and 
focus on the concept of "match the tool to the task". I like Google just 
fine, but it is far from doing everything I'd like it to do. I also see no 
reason for Google to *try* to do everything -- some specialized tasks are 
best in a niche market, where the people who truly care about that will 
pay attention and take care of it. I don't need or want one search engine 
that tries to be all things to all people.

I *do*, very often, wish for the sort of added functionality and interface 
tweaks that you describe in your message below. As you also point out, 
that a search engine researcher is INCAPABLE of really testing the full 
set of results is ... questionable (to put it delicately).

Google makes assumptions about user needs because they can, and it is 
working for them. Right now. ;-)

Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich.edu

On Wed, 6 Jul 2005, Roy Tennant wrote:

> Lars' question and Patricia's answer overlooks the fact that Google is making 
> a huge assumption about user needs, and creating a system that fulfills that 
> assumption but provides no mechanisms for the user to change those 
> assumptions. Allow me to be specific.
>
> Sometimes I want to find, for example, brand new web pages -- pages that are 
> so new I'm not even sure if Google has crawled them yet. But based on the 
> PageRank algorithm as I understand it, these pages would naturally fall to 
> the bottom of the search results. Does Google provide any method to 
> reverse-sort the results? No. Does Google provide a mechanism to view results 
> based on date added to the index? No. Does Google provide a mechanism to sort 
> results based on the last change date of the page itself? No. So what are we 
> left with? Trying to get to the "end" of the search results, wherever that 
> may be. Sorry, but that's bad interface design. The fact that you can't, 
> apparently, even do it given the systems own mechanisms is flat out 
> indefensible. Or, if there numbers are in fact completely wrong and there are 
> really only 900 items instead of 15,000 then I guess they're just lying to 
> us.
>
> Google does one thing, and it appears to do that one thing well. But let's 
> not make the unfortunate assumption that it does more than that one, very 
> specific, thing.
> Roy
>
> On Jul 6, 2005, at 5:54 AM, Patricia F Anderson wrote:
>
>> Hi, Lars,
>> 
>> Interesting question -- why look at lots of results. For myself, I rarely 
>> look at more than the first 300. When I do, the query will fall in one of 
>> these categories:
>> 
>>  - a topic of passionate interest where I truly want to see every possible 
>> link (and I will spend *days* going through *all* links up to the max 
>> displayed);
>> 
>>  - a topic where the first 100 only sporadically revealed anything 
>> relevant, and I have not found the magic combination of terms to focus the 
>> search.
>> 
>> Because I am someone who tends to skim large search results, I have my 
>> Google preferences set to display 50-100 links per page of results, so it 
>> doesn't take me long to skim large results sets.
>> 
>> What makes this question especially interesting to me is that I recently 
>> attended a Grokker demonstration. They emphasized that a core aspect of the 
>> purpose of Grokker's interface is to allow the serious researcher to 
>> rapidly scan large results sets (research veresus search <g>). Their 
>> arbitrary limit for Google is 1000 results per page, but this can be 
>> customized by the end-user. Now, if someone is developing and marketing an 
>> interface for this purpose, one might think there is at least *some* use 
>> for some persons in being able to get beyond the first few pages of 
>> results. It will be interesting to see how Grokker does, how their product 
>> is used, and what types of persons find it most useful.
>> 
>> Best,
>> 
>> Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich.edu
>> 
>> On Wed, 6 Jul 2005, Lars Aronsson wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> Patricia F Anderson wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Ijust tried a search for the word "the". Reported results were
>>>> 3,190,000,000. Maximum displayed results were 946. "Repeat the
>>>> search" button yielded the same number. I tried a few others,
>>>> with equally unpredictatble results.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> Perhaps they have a filter that can tell real searchers apart from
>>> librarians just trying to test the system.  For example, no real
>>> searchers would be interested in more than the first 900 hits, so
>>> if you still click "next page", you are just testing.
>>> 
>>> I'm sorry for my ignorance, but what would be the point in finding
>>> the 947th and 948th hit for any search expression?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>>  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>>>  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Web4lib mailing list
>>> Web4lib at webjunction.org
>>> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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