[Web4lib] Google Print

[Jennifer Heise]

Hm... We've got a pretty good handle on producing metadata for books in our
profession. Why should Google try to reproduce a service that does what we
as libraries and librarians do? Subject searching, for instance, has never
been a strong suit of ISI's citation indexes, or Lexis-Nexis. And sometimes
we find that frustrating. But still, if we want metadata-based searching,
shouldn't we be going to the experts on metadata rather than the experts on
link-based relevance searching?

-- Jenne Heise

On 11/7/05, K.G. Schneider <kgs at bluehighways.com> wrote:
>
> > For searching books -- if someone seeks a book that's relevant on a
> > particular topic -- a provider that searches really good metadata may
> > deliver a much more useful service than one that indexes the full text
> > of the book.
>
> I think it's the combination of the two types of search--baggy
> (search-based) and skin-tight (metadata-based)--that is most effective and
> most likely to help repair the search where the user seeks X but uses term
> Y. As Rich seems to suggest, this is something Amazon appears to grasp
> better than Google, where search is uber alles.
>
> I'm surprised Google is so resolutely anti-metadata. I wonder if part of
> their strategy isn't simply being so overwhelmingly the one true search
> experience that widespread information-seeking behaviors are forced to
> adjust to how they organize the world.
>
> Karen G. Schneider
> kgs at bluehighways.com
>
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