[Web4lib] RE: Another Google question

[Patricia F Anderson]

Just picking up on the discussion.

On Fri, 15 Jul 2005, David Walker wrote:
[snip]
> I personally think Google's link-to search feature has broad interest
> for any company or IT department building a web site, so its
> shortcomings are likely of interest to many, many more people beyond
> this list.
[snip]

I think it is an error to confuse subject searching with link searching, 
as far as judging overall abilities of the entire tool. That is like 
saying oranges taste better than apples.

Link-to searching is indeed important to a variety of people. For myself, 
I appreciate it when a webmaster checks to see who still has active links 
to one of their dead pages, and then notified me to change my link to 
their new address. If I, as a webmaster, don't have a tool to accurately 
tell me who links to my dead page (or how many), then I cannot make 
informed decisions about how to handle such things as redirects.

Here is a parable about relying on Google for link-to information. I had 
this conversation about a year and a half ago with a major medical website 
that used to have tutorials. People loved the tutorials, and many many 
people linked to them. Then the medical website did away with the 
tutorials, but kept redirects in place. The redirects disappeared after a 
year because the top webmaster did a LINK-TO search in *Google* and found 
fewer than ten links to his dead pages. With a LINK-TO search in 
Altavista, I found several hundred links to his dead pages. I shared this 
with him. He was unaware that Google was not as strong with the LINK-TO 
search as with its regular search. He tried a few searches in Altavista, 
and then reinstated the redirects for those popular (but nonexistent) web 
pages.

Parable 2. Tenure. I've heard of faculty in tenure review documents using 
link-to searches to show who links to their pages. They usually aren't 
giving a number, but they might say NIH, the White House, the Library of 
Congress, and the British Library all link to my page (and here's proof). 
If you were trying to show that you 'done good' by what high-powered folk 
link to your site, wouldn't you rather pore over a complete list, than a 
highly selected partial list?

I'm with Roy -- I would prefer that Google either not offer link-to 
searching at all (rather than do it badly or incompletely), or make it 
clear on the results page that this is a highly selective list, and then 
refer people to Altavista or some other more comprehensive tool for a more 
thorough search.

My two-cents worth!

Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich.edu