Google: The Newest Reference Librarian

You probably heard by now that Google has started to experiment with answering reference questions. Ask Google a question, and it will now give you back an answer. This Slashdot Thread has some interesting comments. Someone pointed out that Google does actually parse those common words it claims to ignore. For example:
is there a god, Google replies “The following words are very common and were not included in your search: is a”

So repeat that search w/o is a
there god.
Two rather different result sets are returned.
Google doesn’t yet answer all questions, but it’s interesting to see which questions it can answer already. what is the slashdot effect, What is the capital of California, where was george bush born, and what is a neocon all return answers. Strangly, it can’t answer the simple question; what is the best search engine?

April 8, 2005 by Uncategorized 3

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3 Responses

  1. deborah says:
    April 8, 2005 at 7:04 pm

    things that make me go hmm

    I’m not an anti-search engine type by any means. In fact, I get annoyed at my library school because instead of teaching which questions are appropriate to ask of search engines, which to ask of books, and which to ask of databases, many of the profs just go on “Google Bad!” rants.

    I’d like to know more about the reference sources used and the criteria used to choose them: “Google feeds this service with information from Web sites it considers reliable”. I’m a huge believer in the accuracy of much of the information on the open Web, but I choose my sources carefully. If Google is going to be taken as accurate reference source by people, I would like to have confidence in the accuracy of their sources.

    I know they cite, but the point isn’t that you or I could look at the cited URLs and say “that one’s trustworthy, that one’s not”, the point is that most people won’t do that. And I worry about the misleading possible as people start to believe that this information from Google is packaged as “facts”. I adore Wikipedia, but a Wikipedser generally knows that there is a non-zero risk that the information is inaccurate, and processes accordingly. I’m not sure that the consumers of “google facts”, as some of the news buzz is hyping them, are as aware that they need to double check Wikipedia information.

    Reply
  2. Anonymous Patron says:
    April 9, 2005 at 3:22 pm

    Learning how to use Google might help
    More criticism of Google, on a site that should know better. Of course Google has stopwords, but (Shock! Horror!) it has a way around it. Simply type in your phrase and put a + in front of words that you want included.

    The search therefore reads:
    “+is there +a god” and it works perfectly well.

    I’m all in favor of criticising search engines when they deserve it, but to do so out of ignorance for not actually having looked to see if there’s a solution seems pretty stupid to me.

    Reply
  3. librarianscott says:
    April 10, 2005 at 9:27 am

    Re:Learning how to use Google might help
    You are missing the point. Google is not treating those words as stop words! It is treating them as a phrase even though it says it is not.

    Reply

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