Hola, Senor!
James Weinheimer <j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu> wrote:
> You say that you get back "...1.3 million hits of which, one can assume,
> there is valuable information. I go through them, and copy and paste into my
> research document anything that smacks of gold."
>
> What??? You go through 1.3 million hits???? You are a really fast reader!
I *think* you know what that statement really mean; I go through the
first five or six pages, middle-click on links that seem relevant for
me, and leave the Google results page open. I now have about 20 tabs
open, and I scroll through each and one looking for relevant info.
Some will have links, some will have text, some will have questions
where there might be answer. When these tabs are exhausted I check if
my urges have been satisfied. Yes? Done. No? Go through the next 5 or
6 pages of Google results, pop relevant pages into tabs, rinse, repeat
until all my naughty urges go away.
> the result is completely out of control.
Umm, it's not called "relevance ranked" because they are completely
out of control. They're called that because there is an implied
methodology of relevancy that may or may not match my preferences, but
they are *far* from out of control.
> When they have gotten the
> same types of results for simple purposes relating to their own general
> interest, they don't care so much about the search result since it can be
> fun to "surf." But when they are grappling with something important such as
> writing a paper, where they have to stick to a specific topic, and they
> could flunk out if they quote something stupid, they see Google as something
> much less useful and more similar to a toy. And it frightens them.
I think you're extrapolating a little bit too much here, mostly
because I don't agree and have different experiences. I deal with
students a lot these days, helping them study for, well, "something
important like writing a paper", and there are really good techniques
one can use with Google. The first phase is to search in your own
words. Then you find more formalized statements, and you search for
those. Then you ad a few keywords to that, maybe a couple of words in
quotation to filter. You'll probably find some websites that look
proper, either by name or design, and you use the site: trick. You
know the drill.
The interesting part is ; did I get enough and good enough information
through this method?
> The Google use is a
> secretive business term but one chosen strategically to make their customers
> more comfortable. It works.
Yes, it does work.
> Second:
> What exactly are you looking at when you see the results from "black people
> in agriculture in the United States" and also, what are you not looking at?
There is a better librarian answer if I popped that same search into
an OPAC and got a few hundred pages of, um, something?
> Well, you miss many original documents, because the term "blacks" was not
> the word used for African-American people in agriculture in the early United
> States. There were other terms used, some highly insulting today.
But you're making a blanket statement on what is a process. You'd face
the *exact* same problem in a library catalog. And just like in the
catalog, you can get hints as to what to search for next.
> When a
> cataloger puts in metadata, it's a completely different matter. In a library
> catalog, you don't have to search these older terms, but in full-text you
> do, or they will never come up in the result--and you will never realize it.
> As a result, you miss entire categories of really useful information.
Again, you're assuming people are complete idiots.
> Other problems: "agriculture" is unnecessarily limiting. You would also have
> to search at least "farming" but probably others as well. Searching "United
> States" will miss most of the information in the individual states, where
> there will be lots of possibly the most interesting resources.
>
> I won't discuss "quality of information" here, which is another huge problem
> that people have to face every day. You say, "anything that smacks of gold"
> but how am I supposed to know that? Also, I won't discuss exactly what
> Google is and is not searching when you do a search, because this is another
> of their closely-head secrets.
But there is *no* difference between the library catalog, its meta
data, and Google in any of the searches we're here discussing.
Problems here, and problems there. By me saying Google certainly
doesn't imply your ILS serves me any better. Where is this "better"
that you're talking about?
> I would suggest that when people see matters in this way, they will see the
> immensity of such a task, and that they will have a bit more respect for the
> work done in catalogs, which smooths the way for people. But of course, "we
> won't get no respect!"
The problem is that meta data *doesn't* solve this problem, but I bet
a small fortune that future textual analysis will.
> Perhaps this is too detailed for your purposes
I gave you a very detailed and very real use case. Can you solve it better?
> Library catalogs are designed on different principles and have strengths in
> exactly these areas
How? Unless you mean "by invoking a reference librarian to do the
searches for you"?
> and this is why I think that creating a tool that would
> bring the strengths of library catalogs together with full-text retrieval
> tools would be the best. But simply ignoring what our tools can do would be
> the same as allowing superstition and bias and even censorship to run rampant.
I've yet to see how much better the library tools are. Prove me wrong.
Regards,
Alex
--
Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Mon Apr 26 2010 - 06:49:36 EDT