I step into this debate with a whole lot of trepidation, but might I
suggest that single-word searches for something as broad as "cat" are
an exceptionally poor search strategy regardless of the system?
Perhaps in all of these situations that are currently being tossed
about the problem is with the searcher and not with either Google or
library catalogs?
I feel pretty confident saying that, given an actual patron with an
actual question that they're trying to answer, nobody ever wants
everything that is cataloged under "cats" any more than they want
everything that comes up in Google when you search for "cats." Just
for fun I did a subject search for "cats" in WorldCat and came up with
134505 results; of the first ten, one was a Garfield book, five were
juvenile fiction, and four were Lillian Jackson Braun mysteries. Yes
they're all about the cats with four legs and fur, and yes this is
quite a bit better than Google does when you search for "cats," but
odds are that some very large percentage of these 134505 results are
still going to be irrelevant to the real live person who wants
"picture books about cats for my kid" or "advice on how to make my cat
stop clawing up my sofa."
So can we possibly try moving this discussion towards the kinds of
information that people actually search for and not for impossibly
broad concepts like "cat"? It seems obvious to me that neither Google
nor library catalogs do very well at finding what you actually want
when you only give them something as broad as "cat" to work with.
Julia
Received on Sat Jan 05 2008 - 18:22:12 EST