[Web4lib] RE: Another Google question

[Ryan Eby]

I'd have to say that google/yahoo/etc tend to do fine for both search
types at least for me. The "known items" tend to be the easiest but
the conceptual I can usually get with one or two revisions of my
keywords. I'll do a search, scan the first few results and modify my
search if need be based on what I see.

This isn't the case for everyone, of course. I have friends that will
be searching for hours, tell me what they want and I find it in a few
seconds. Choosing the right keywords can be difficult especially since
I know many people for who english isn't their first language. I think
this is a skill though that can help people in academic databases and
the like and so is very useful outside of google.

Ryan

On 7/15/05, Karen Coyle <kcoyle at kcoyle.net> wrote:
> 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 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.