[Web4lib] Google Print

[Norma Hewlett]

The GooglePrint beta (print.google.com) doesn't seem to be a very 
useful search tool in its current incarnation. In fact, if my quick-and-
dirty test today is a good sample, it appears to be exactly the kind of 
mish-mash some people have predicted. 

Today I ran a search on the GooglePrint beta for "dressage". (This is a 
style of horseback riding that requires intense training, and there are 
many books about the techniques.) From on the results of this search, 
it appears that googleprint is retrieving any book where the search 
word appears anywhere in the text. There doesn't appear to be any 
weighting, not even for words in the title.

In the first 50 books listed, there were no dressage manuals and 
nothing that would be of use to a serious dressage rider. There were 
general books such as The Encycolopedia of the Horse (1 page on 
dressge), a number of books on other styles of riding that briefly 
mention dressage, several young people's novels from the Thoroughbred 
series (think Baby Sitters Club on horseback), a Lonely Planet travel 
guide to Slovenia, a biography of Christopher Reeve, a Breyer model 
horse guide--and on and on. The only book that looked as if it might be 
a serious guide to Dressage training was in German.

In contrast, when I ran a basic book search for "dressage" on Amazon, 
49 of the first 50 entries were for books about the techniques of 
dressage training. (Number 36 was a detective story about a murdered 
dressage rider titled "Death By Dressage.")

Jean Hewlett

Regional Librarian
University of San Francisco