One thing Google is not, is uniform for different users in different
locales. It is possible to set Google to sanitize (SafeSearch) results
from anywhere, and the default is to have moderate filtering on, at
least for the images retrieved. It is possible to also have the filter
set to reject "offensive" text, so who knows what settings individuals
are using. Also, as James is in Rome his results could be affected by
his location too. Even within the U.S., there are several different
servers delivering Google results, not always with the same results.
This having been said, Google is providing context through surrounding
words from the site, since they have no idea whether you are looking for
a pet, a socially-unacceptable member of the opposite sex, or one of
those devices used in woodworking benches to keep your wood in place.
Libraries supply context too, though in some cases (like "Dogs"), they
assume that most people mean the furry mammal, so the qualifer is only
supplied for other contexts. What controlled vocabularies do provide
though, is the ability to collocate materials on the same topic, thus
you don't have to look at each entry to determine what the usage is for
that term. If you are interested only in "Dogs as laboratory animals",
"Dogs for the blind", or the choreographic work of that name, the other
stuff is filtered out, leaving only those items of interest.
Charley
> Jim Weinheimer said:
>
> "Try searching Google for dogs and see what you get: rude references to women and probably politicians, porno and who knows what else, and you'll spend hours going through them all, but it will all be arranged by this magic of 'relevance.'"
>
> I tried searching Google for dogs and the results made me wonder if Jim actually TRIED the search himself. I looked at the first 150 search results (more than the average user would do) and 97% of the results were about the canine animal. The first non-canine result didn't pop up until the 30th result. And the five non-canine results were not offensive in the way Jim alluded. While a lot of the matches are for dog breeders and people selling dog-related paraphenalia, there are several meta-sites that provide a fair amount of info about dogs.
>
> I'm not defending Google, or saying it's better than library catalogs, etc. I'm just saying that it's unfair to misrepresent Google the way that Jim did.
>
> Bernie Sloan
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now.
>
Received on Sun Jan 06 2008 - 14:33:21 EST