[Web4lib] RE: Another Google question

[Karen Coyle]

Mike Taylor wrote:

>
>The big, big win you get from Google is that its top hit (or second,
>or third) is nearly always the one you want.
>  
>
What Google is very good at is the retrieval of pages based on proper 
names (the name of a company, an organization, or a product) where there 
is a single obvious answer. So if you search on IBM or iPod or american 
civil liberties union, you get a good hit. For various reasons 
(trademark being not the least of them), those names work as 
identifiers, and there are individual pages dedicated to the things they 
identify. It's almost like a yellow pages entry for known pages. For 
that "yellow pages" function it works quite well.

For other types of searches, Google doesn't work so well. There's no 
"conceptual" searching. Topics like "childhood development" or "legal 
theory" come out very poorly. For names of people, you tend to get pages 
that have lists of the graduating class of blah blah high school, 
because they have every possible forename and surname combination. 
(Note: you and I do well on google searches because not only do we have 
our own web pages, we have our own domains. I suspect that makes a big 
difference. My friend Bill Jones doesn't fare so well. Even adding the 
name of his institution I don't see anything about him until the third 
page.) Do a search on something like "antique candy dish" and you find 
yourself with ebay-like pages that list 20-50 items, each with one of 
the words in your query.

One of the things that I think we can conclude about Google, and that it 
should  be possible to study, is that people tend to approach search 
engines with a verison of the library world's "known item" search. You 
are looking for someone or some page that you know exists or are pretty 
sure should exist. (After all, why go searching for something that might 
not be there?) You have an "identifier" in mind that you will use for 
this search. What Google has done brilliantly is respond to the way 
people search, not how we think they *should* search (which is more the 
philosophy behind library catalogs). But that also means that Google 
embodies the intellectual limitations of the average person's search 
techniques.

kc

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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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