SPAM-LOW: Re: [Web4lib] Re: Future of libraries - google rant - feel totally free to delete ; ) - although some feedback would be interesting

[Frances, Melodie]

This is awesome (or appears to be - hope hope hope!!!) - someone finally
applying library expertise to a search engine - what a novel concept
(sorry for the snarkyness). But I've gotten tired of how great people
think google is (personally I feel that it USED to be great but hasn't
been for a while).

In fact, since we are all speaking anecdotally so much here, I had a
weird google experience the other night - my cat was having a manic
reaction to anesthesia at 4 a.m. the other morning - not an emergency
thing or I obviously would have called the vet, but I wanted to see if
it was ok to give her some xanax. Lo and behold a xanax search on google
when combined with feline and mania gave me mostly a bunch of wack
websites on how to buy xanax AND on how to get sex in my particular city
(!!!) or articles where you had to pay. The main problem though was that
I used a term that I guess is massively tied in with marketing stuff.
Using the generic terms helped SOME but not much. I probably wouldn't
have given the cat xanax without a vet's ok anyway but I was very
surprised by how much that one term messed up my ability to search
meaningfully. Which is my basic criticism of google - before it became a
marketing tool disguised as a search engine it was just so much more
useful.

Melodie Morgan Frances
Head of Cataloging
Graduate Theological Union
mfrances at gtu.edu
510-649-2521

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Brian Gray
Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 4:19 PM
To: Christopher Kiess
Cc: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: Re: SPAM-LOW: Re: [Web4lib] Re: Future of libraries

It seems in time we will know. See:
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/6102.html

Brian Gray
mindspiral at gmail.com


On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 2:53 PM, Christopher Kiess <clkiess at gmail.com>
wrote:
> I knew of the one connected to OCLC, but not of this one, Andrea.
> Interesting. I wonder what would happen if it was commercially
marketed like
> Cha Cha.


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