Anonymous Patron writes “Google lead in search is narrowing is a New York Times you can read at IHT.com. They say so far, the fruits of thousands of computer scientists’ labor have not seemed to shake Google from its perch at the top of the search market.
Hardly a week passes without an announcement heralding an Internet search innovation by one of the big sites – Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, which is testing the search engine that it will soon promote on its MSN service. Even the smaller players, like Acoona.com and A9, the search engine run by Amazon.com, are trying to get in on the act.
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I sure hope they are wrong
This article points out a few problems in logic, for me anyway. The one that startled me most was, “If you slapped the Yahoo logo on the Google results, a lot of people wouldn’t know the difference,” Sullivan said.” I would hope that if you were a regular google user, you would notice that your search results had changed. I realize that not everyone is “up” on search engines, but they should be.
Doesn’t anyone else have a problem that MSN is the default homepage for new computer owners? This the worst thing since so many new computer owners have no idea how to even run their computer. BTW, if anyone doubts this, I can fill a room with current students who don’t even realize there is a such a feature as “homepage” settings. Sorry, this is a hot button topic for me and essentially it means big business screws the end-user and they don’t care.
Search Engine Literacy?
Good points indeed. It’s all about information literacy I guess. The trouble is, you’re right, people don’t know, but they just don’t care. For those of us who make this stuff their lives it’s all very important, but for most folks it doesn’t matter, they’ve got bigger fish to fry.
Is that bad, good, other? I don’t really know.
For us as librarians it should be our jobs to make sure we teach this stuff to as many civilians as possible.
Default Home Page
The default home page depends on the deal your computer-maker has cut: My HP came with a default set to Yahoo. Basically, the person selling you the PC takes a bribe to set you up that way (and many users may never figure out how to change it).
But as to search results, I think many searchers among the general public care only that the first couple of results they see (which might even include ‘sponsored listings’) provides them with a reasonably good answer. They don’t care that it’s the best answer. They just want an answer, quickly.
So if Yahoo’s results do that, the user isn’t going to care that they’ve used Yahoo instead of Google. The engine is, in a way, invisible to them. So they do need a good dose of information literacy from an expert.
Re:Search Engine Literacy?
The difficult part is *how*. In my job, a bulk of the time the students just don’t care about the accuracy of the information. How do you teach the civilians, when the civilians don’t care?
The worst part, are the teachers who tell their students “Just get a website”. No instructions, no guides to good vs bad info, *nothing*.
It is possible that we may lose the battle of information literacy.