[Web4lib] RE: Another Google question

[Mike Taylor]

> Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 09:07:25 -0700
> From: Karen Coyle <kcoyle at kcoyle.net>
> 
>> No.  And that's the whole point.  We couple of hundred information
>> professionals on this list care deeply about this stuff, but we do
>> need to come to terms with the fact that no-one else does.  As far
>> as the other 5,999,999,980 people out there are concerned, Google
>> is just fine.  If we pretend otherwise, we're hiding out heads in
>> the sand.
>
> The fact that they think it's fine doesn't make it fine. Ignorance
> may be bliss, but it's a lousy basis for what purports to be an
> "information society."

Well, I pretty much agree with you.  Thing is, 5,999,999,980 people
don't, and that is a pretty big proportion of our market.  I think we
can be much more productive if we spend our time analysing what Google
does right, and learning from that, than if we devote our time to
picking holes in what it does wrong.

Our goal here is to do with people's perceptions as much as it is to
do with the reality.  And you have summed up people's perceptions of
Google perfectly when you say.

> Most people have no idea how Google searching works -- to them it is
> magic.

Precisely.

The big, big win you get from Google is that its top hit (or second,
or third) is nearly always the one you want.  That's rarely true of
OPACs.  As we've agreed among ourselves many times on this list, its
biggest failing is -- paradoxically -- weak and uneven coverage.  (I
say paradoxically because its eight billion records comfortably
outweigh any library catalogue I know about by a factor of 160.)
Well, then: if we want to compete with Google, that's an obvious area
for us to push.  But the real question for me is whether "compete" is
the right thing for us to be doing at all.

 _/|_	 ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor  <mike at miketaylor.org.uk>  http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "Sitting on the sofa with all our classified information ..." --
	 Monty Python's Flying Circus.

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