Recent Discussions in The Googleversehttp://forums.siliconvalley.com/kr-svgoogle05Sun, 22 Nov 2009 02:40:24 GMThttp://forums.siliconvalley.com/dir-app/acx/ACDispatch.aspx?webtag=kr-svgoogle05&action=message&tid=1&tsn=26John:Along with doing about 4 other things including ResourceShelf, DocuTicker, SEW Blog, and a great deal of speaking I'm glad to see that another librarian has joined in the mix. Now, some responses. I agree Exalead.com (from France) is doing some great work. Smaller database but sometimes smaller can be better. Great presentation of results. Another engine people have actually said they've switched to as their first choice (can you believe it) is Clusty.com. The value added services along with it's knowledge discovery possibilities. Btw, Clusty can do much more than bring back web results look at ClusterMed.info (returns and dynamically clusters PubMed material and due to the structured records you can cluster in many ways). They also offer this tool for BioMed info. (http://biometacluster.com/)Btw, I have links to a few of my other fave tools on this page from a recent presentation. http://tinyurl.com/adxe4Simplicity and Sufficing. I agree with both. However, many of the one-time difficult tools have become much easier to use. The problem, is I see it, is that many students and FACULTY have no idea what's available to them from home, dorm, office, whereever. Btw, this is not only an issue in academia but also for the general public. Just look at what anyone with a San Francisco Public Library card can access for free 24x7. http://www.sfpl.org/sfplonline/dbcategories.htmOne service, NetLibrary just passed scanning and making searchable more than 100,000 in-copyright (mostly) books. Print, annotate, etc.Once they experience the power of these tools their hooked and often come back wanting more, training, that is.Also, I have to include a mention of one of the most amazing sites for public domain books on the web. When does this person sleep?http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/051202-222646 Btw, it I had a dollar everytime someone said they had no idea that these tools were even possible, we could all retire. In fact, this just happened tonight. Iit's not just a SF Public thing most libraries offer similar services. However, with the exception of a few journalist, Bazeley, is one of them (-:, most have written about tools other than Google. I also blame our profession for not being out there from the early days (not unexpected however) and the companies that sell these products. Again, people can't use what they don't know about. Sufficing. One thing these and other specialized tools can do, if used properly is save people time and possibly give them a better answer. I also thing some of this plays on critical info skills which get little attention these days. For many people and students, the first answer on Google is the best answer posssible. They have no idea that engines (WHILE NOT DIRECTLY PROFITTING from it) have their relevancy "gamed." Not a good or bad thing, it's just the way it works. Remember, as been said several times this week Google and other web engines are in the ad business vs info companies like Dialog, LexisNexis, and Factiva. >>>even many of the students in the library tech and graduate librarian programs where I have taught have not even used the advanced search capabilities of these search engines. >>>Right on. Very true. I've heard from most companies that 98-99% of the searches that come through the dbase make no use of anything called advanced searching. Heck, many people don't know about the specialty tools the big engines offer let alone specialized web-based databases. Teaching these skills is a new role for the info profession. The problem is that we market and brand ourselves not very well. I also think they will become more of an issue as the general web engines grow larger. Remember, the bigger the database the more difficult it can be to get what you need, QUICKLY. Specialty databases or what the industry refers to as verticals. Plenty of money and some useful tools being made availabe. Blinkx, Answers.com, Podscope, AllMusic.com, Topix, Kayak, Become.com, etc. The problem is that its hard to change peoples habits but it's also hard for these companies to gain mindshare. Sure, some of this material is now in Google , Yahoo, MSN but if it appears at result number 25 or 55 does it make it difference? The Invisible or deep web is any result beyond 10. Clusty can help offering what they call "selective ignorace" and helping surface rsults that are not always in the top 10. Of course tools like Gigablast that you mention and a new service called Rollyo make it easy (especially Rollyo) for an end user to create domain specific search tools with just a click. The same goes for fee-based verticals like TVEyes. An amazing product that shows that the spoken word is now as searchable as the printed. I fully realize that the word Google sells newspapers, clicks, books but the media has been so fixated with one company that Vise is right in Google being very concerned with keeping and growing mindshare. Btw, they do it so well and have, for the most part, since the departure of one of the people I belive most responsible for Google's success, Cindy McCaffrey. However, this fixation makes other large web engines and the growing amount of vericals out there appear as also rans when they appear in the last graph. Direct Answers for "ready ref queries" A big trend. Answers instead of links. Everyone is doing it but Ask Jeeves i think is the most advanced. Two examples. Btw this is all done using Ask's automated tech, the old AJ was junk but they suffer from a brand name that people think is still doing what they did in 1999. A) Who won the academy award for best actress in 1984http://www.ask.com/web?q=who+won+the+academy+award+for+best+actress+in+1984&qsrc=0&o=0They've gone to the IMDb and mined the answer set automaticallyB) http://www.ask.com/web?q=when+is+labor+day+in+2006&qsrc=1&o=0C) The BeatlesA virtual read ref shelf, saves clicks, and time. Help focusing search. http://www.ask.com/web?q=the+beatles&qsrc=1&o=0Btw, this direct answer trend could well in the mobile search enviro. Before I conclude I want to make mention of two excellent non-commercial directories that both come from California and where quality of the underlying resource trumps quantity. At this point the ODP is a joke and spam producer. I've even heard of ODP editors selling access to the editing module on eBay. Plus with so many versions of the OPen Directory out there, it becomes even more of a joke. The two directories are the LII (http://www.lii.org) and InfoMine (...[Message truncated]http://forums.siliconvalley.com/dir-app/acx/ACDispatch.aspx?webtag=kr-svgoogle05&action=message&tid=1&tsn=25You're entirely welcome. I found your contribution particularly interesting, as I mentioned. A valuable insight into the problems between groups of workers in experimental biology and functional genomics can be found in:"A New Biology for a New Century" by Carl R. Woese: Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, Vol. 68 Number 2, June 2004, pp. 173-186. The article is very valuable, and I recommend it highly. You might pass it along to your contacts at Google, for that matter, as it presents the fundamental issues I touched upon (without the historical comparison to Wall Street, of course) in a very elegant and compelling manner.All the best,RobBreedlove@earthlink.nethttp://forums.siliconvalley.com/dir-app/acx/ACDispatch.aspx?webtag=kr-svgoogle05&action=message&tid=1&tsn=24Jean,It's interesting that you're "seeing a swing back to the importance of trusted brand name sites, i.e. Consumer Reports, because they have a reputation for providing a certain type of answer, without having to dig through irrelevant search results." I personally haven't seen this trend, but it makes sense - not just for relevance, but for trustworthiness as well. Google's Page Rank system is brilliant, of course, but it doesn't distinguish between reliable and unreliable information. As Web 2.0 syndication tools foster the proliferation of dubious content - witness last week's Wikipedia-Seigenthaler affair - people may well move back to traditional trusted sources (on line or off) for information. This is an important challenge for Google, and for the Web 2.0 world in general.-Nick Carrhttp://forums.siliconvalley.com/dir-app/acx/ACDispatch.aspx?webtag=kr-svgoogle05&action=message&tid=1&tsn=23This is Jean Bedord, an analyst with Shore Communications focusing on digital content and content technologies, and an adjunct faculty member teaching "Online Searching" at San Jose State University.   Search has never been as easy as the simple white Google box makes it look--my students struggle with synonyms.   They have to learn to search under multiple terms--"high school" , "secondary school" and "K-12" are alternative terms, and needed  to find appropriate information.   Then they have to learn that Google is not just the main Google, but multiple "vertical search" engines, depending on whether the content comes from books, news, blogs or a limited set of scholarly publications, not to be confused with the more comprehensive information services found in public and academic libraries. Google faces a paradox, since it brought search to the masses, but also exposes these novice searchers to both the power and the frustration of "finding answers".  I'm seeing a swing back to the importance of trusted brand name sites, i.e. Consumer Reports, because they have a reputation for providing a certain type of answer, without having to dig through irrelevant search results.  The challenge is whether Google can use technology to overcome the inherent difficulties in the structure of content, or whether there will be major shifts in traffic to specialized sites and search engines, as users become more sophisticated consumers of online information.http://forums.siliconvalley.com/dir-app/acx/ACDispatch.aspx?webtag=kr-svgoogle05&action=message&tid=1&tsn=22I'm surprised that Google's potential to know the dynamics of the web hasn't been discussed.  We hear about the 'what', the static network of transactions and data, but not about the 'when'. Google can drop a pebble in the net and see where (and how fast) the ripples go.  This means ad placement can be optimized & sold in time as well as webspace, to catch the peak of users' attention spans. If IM and email are correlated in time with search/news/blog access, then the opinion makers and trend leaders can be statistically identified and fed ads enriched for their downstream groups. As Google expands into more traditional media and mobile, position-aware applications, you can track how many click-thrus your video billboard gets, and adjust the content in real time. My question is: When this is all implemented, will we be just an extension of the web, optimized along with the routers and server farms?