Karen Coyle wrote:
> Tom Keays wrote:
>> Bad form. Following up on my own post. I also wonder why Google
>> doesn't expose Google Books content in their general search engine
>> results?
> The main reason, which came up at the LC meeting at Google last week, is
> that they don't have a way yet to rank the books.
Ha! See, we can't just "go what Google does". Even Google hasn't yet
figured out a way to "do what Google does" with books.
I know that most people on this list know this, but one of my continual
frustrations is people in the library world that think "Gee, we just
need to do what Google does." As if there aren't any hard problems left
to solve, Google has solved them all. Google is just this business, man!
But this anecdote will certainly be what I bring up next time I have to
deal with someone from the "Do we have to worry about any of this stuff
anymore? Can't we just let Google do it all" school..
Jonathan
> And even if they
> figure out how to rank the books, how will they interleave the ranked
> books and the ranked web pages? What is the relative rank between the
> book ranked #1 and the article ranked #1 if the ranking criteria are
> different? And they will be different, as Dan Clancy said at the
> meeting, because, as he explains it, the web is already organized and
> "ranked" through user-provided links. There is no user-provided ranking
> in a set of books.
>
> A key thing to remember is that Google is not so much a search engine as
> it is a ranking engine. Searching is the easy part, and lots of other
> systems also do it. It's the ranking that makes Google useful.
>
> kc
>
> --
> -----------------------------------
> Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
> ph.: 510-540-7596
> fx.: 510-848-3913
> mo.: 510-435-8234
> ------------------------------------
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Mon Mar 19 2007 - 07:55:57 EDT