Pete writes “BBC technology commentator Bill Thompson asks why we settle for less when it comes to web searching http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4131793.stm
“Unless I am looking for a straightforward piece of factual information – yesterday Max wanted to know what the five tastes were and could only remember sweet, salt, sour and bitter – I always search on two or three sites.
And I am making a lot more use of specific searches on places like Wikipedia and subscription database services.
But it has proven harder than I expected it would be to stop going straight to Google when I need to find something out, and I think it is time to admit defeat.
Google is, as sites like Searchenginewatch have been saying for some time, the best search engine.
The trouble is, it is still not very good.””
The trouble with being Google
The trouble with being Google is the same as with any large and successful company — that you become an easy target, a focus, for every kind of disaffection and condemnation. What we in Australia call the Tall Poppy syndrome (because tall poppies are the one’s children like to strike the heads off).
This article chooses to place Google in the center of the target, to good rhetorical effect, but his real beef is with our inability to let go of old technology. He complains that searching, even with Google, which he acknowledges as the best, is woeful, in strong part because we, as page authors, don’t include metadata.
It’s worth pointing out that Google actually ignores metadata, because it proved too easy for pornographers and other villains to cheat and lead the innocent to their sites through bogus metadata. Google now deliberately indexes only content.
The author Bill Thompson also wants to
“turn the web into a database that can be efficiently searched rather than today’s massive collection of linked documents.”
But the web is not a database, nor is it even a collection, in any coherent sense of the word. Metadata is a good idea, but it and other attempts to “tame the web” and enforce organisation are doomed. Certainly we need to develop smarter ways to index the web, but we also need to accept that it is, by its nature, untameable, and accept the sometimes-woeful results from our searches.
Google, The Web, and Everything
But it has proven harder than I expected it would be to stop going straight to Google when I need to find something out, and I think it is time to admit defeat.
See there’s the problem, there’s nothing wrong with using Google to find information. We all do that. But I think we have a responsibility as info folks to educate and inform people that Google isn’t always the best thing in the world for what you’re after. Sometimes an encyclopedia is more informative, and if you can’t get to the glossy dead tree encyclopedias, we can refer them to Wikipedia and such like.
For some reason, people forgot that Google is a search engine like any other. Sure it’s good, it’s probably even the best on the web. But any computer geek rolling his own bawx could tell you that the best hammer in the world isn’t what you need to install a motherboard. It used to be common practice for all of us to check two, three, and more search engines looking for the best results. Now I think far too many of us hit Google alone and go with whatever it says. It’s gotta lotta features, but they’re not always the best.
For instance, a while back I was looking to digitally paint a fencer for a friend who’s playing a fencer in a role playing game. It had to be a female fencer though. So I hit Google Images and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried to find anything I could use for anatomical reference and modeling. Result: I had a good looking female friend of mine pose with my foil and I took several snapshots of her. Google gave me nothing but fits. Every time I put in search items like female, fencer, woman, women’s fencing, etc, I’d get back either images that were no longer on their servers, images that wouldn’t work, or lovely pictures of male fencers.
Meanwhile check out what Altavista Images offers for a search of Women’s Fencing. I didn’t know about Altavista’s image search until after the picture was done. I could have used a lot of those images.
There’s more to life than Google. We know it, and now we need to convince others.
What’s wrong with subscription databases?
The writer seems to think there’s something wrong because they’re finding subscription databases to offer value that the open web doesn’t.
Sure, use multiple open-web search engines. Great. But, you know, all those a&i databases, with human indexing based on field-specific vocabularies, are there for a reason.
Full disclosure: my employer is, among other things, a vendor and builder of subscription databases. I don’t believe the open web search engines will ever be as useful for direct access to articles in anthropology as Anthropology Plus, for example…