> On 12/22/07, Nancy Cochran <nancy.cochran_at_earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> > Considering Google - not sausage - what are the lines of code that
> > normalize the feminine and the masculine; the singular and the plural; the
> > past, present and future tense; capital letters and lower case characters;
> > silly punctuation like an apostrophe to indicate
> ownership; parts of
> > speech as simple as nouns and verbs? And then of course, how
> does Google
> > get the differing language versions of the same universally used word?
> > It is important to note that they often do. And they do it in
> the
> > background.
I got into this rather late, but I would like to point out that the purpose of Google vs. the purpose of libraries is completely different and this is reflected in their tools. Google is a business and as such, aims at "Customer satisfaction." Therefore, if the customer is satisfied, that is the end of their responsibility.
I would contend that librarians practice a profession, such as doctors or lawyers. A doctor worries less about satisfying the customer, i.e. telling patients what they want to hear, and tells them what they need to hear. This may make the patient/customer very angry. Librarians follow a code of ethics, which does not even exist for businesses such as Google. The ALA code is at: http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/statementspols/codeofethics/codeethics.htm
A few of them can be pointed to for thought:
II. We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources.
III. We protect each library user's right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.
VI. We do not advance private interests at the expense of library users, colleagues, or our employing institutions.
VII. We distinguish between our personal convictions and professional duties and do not allow our personal beliefs to interfere with fair representation of the aims of our institutions or the provision of access to their information resources.
This is quite different from what you find at Google, where you can find obvious and numerous instances of google-bombing (and how many are not so obvious?!), and the idea of privacy and advancing private interests is just lacking in Google. Google censors itself in China; Yahoo helps send Chinese journalists to prison. The list can go on.
***Please note*** that I am not saying anything bad about Google and other search engines--I'm just pointing out that they are quite different from libraries, which deal with information in completely different ways, and include reliability and completeness of results, a lack of bias, no profiting, etc. We should not expect anything else from profit-making businesses, since this is how they operate. It would be unfair to expect a code of ethics from them.
Therefore, people who look in Google for materials about "Dostoyevsky" may be really happy until they realize what they are missing because of different spellings of the name, some of them quite strange. I believe that one of the primary tasks of librarians today should be to let people know what they are missing.
The term "relevance" is an advertising device, such as McDonald's "We do it all for you." The problem is, while I believe very few people really believed that McDonald's really does do it all for everybody else except themselves, I fear that users of Google believe literally that the items they are looking at really are the "relevant" ones. But I don't know. Perhaps I'm wrong.
James Weinheimer
Received on Thu Jan 03 2008 - 08:27:10 EST