My view on Google

I have just been reading Walt Crawford's article, "Iconoclasm and the Great God Google" in Cites & Insights, Sept 2005 about an excellent thread about Google on Web4Lib.  As usual, Walt's writing cuts through all of the fluff and gets right to the point.    I agree with him on most points.  He divides the Google vs. Library discussion into three categories.  I am going to oversimplify and  say the categories really are:

 

• Google good all of the time.
• Google good design.
• Google always bad.

I find that I fall into the camp that Google is good design and a good  model for library systems to follow. That does not mean I agree with everything Google does nor necessarily how it does it.  Google is very limiting in lots of ways for the searcher as Walt points out in referring to Roy Tennant's comments.  Google does not allow you to bring new pages to the top.  The user can not sort the results at all.  That is something our own OPACs and commercial databases do very well. Let us not ruin our own search tools by making them completely like Google.  What users want from my own experience and reading is a single search interface that finds everything.  Librarians could build that and still keep the sorting and other functions our current search tools provide.

 

Walt mentions one comment I made on the list when I thought people were stooping to "Google Bashing" in picking apart many very obscure features of Google.  I still think it was nitpicking but may have been interesting nitpicking.

 

I use Google quite a bit myself as well as Yahoo and other search engines.  I have also set up SFX to interact with Google Scholar and have added our library to the joint project between OCLC and Google linking to our library holdings.  As Google Scholar continues to grow and increases its coverage of content from databases, I will start teaching it and using it in my research methods class.  Google in neither intrinsically evil or good.  It is also not a universal solution.  It does show the way by example where we might go as librarians might take our libraries.  I see one possible future where each library has a Google like interface to its resources that may be linked into Google or Yahoo in some way.  I am not talking about federated searching or a metasearch engine.  I am talking about a single search box that searches all of our resources already linked together in one searchable index.  To me that would be the ideal future.