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July 17, 2003
Between the site redesign that makes the entire front page look like a mass of tiny text and this little diatribe, Slate is having a really crummy week. (This article I read because it's at the top of the page with a big graphic -- that's all I'm reading at Slate right now, because I'm not wading through the aforementioned sea of tiny text.) "Googleholes," my foot. 1. "All shopping, all the time." This is resolvable with the willingness to add ONE WORD to your search. Every single thing he cited I was able to fix with a two-word, rather than one-word, search. What kind of a moron would do research on tulips by typing the word "flowers" into a search engine? Would you do the same thing in a library by going to the "flowers" section and flipping through all the books located there? No. You would not. When I typed in "tulips research," I got -- you guessed it -- RESEARCH ABOUT TULIPS. As for finding reviews of products, if you type in the word "reviews" after the product name, you get -- yes, you guessed it again -- product reviews. This isn't a problem with Google, this is a problem with this guy trying to conserve keystrokes because he's apparently typing with his toes. 2. "Skewed Synonyms." Again, crap. Give it a hint! Give it another word! Moreover, again, what kind of research would properly be conducted by doing a search on the word "apple"? That is just asinine. If you want to know about the nutritional value of apples, try "apple nutrition." If you want to know about apple trees, try "apple trees." If you want to know about Fiona Apple, TRY "FIONA APPLE," for God's sake. It doesn't require "googlewashing" to somehow brainwash Google into misreading your unforgivably vague search term when you've sabotaged the result. 3. "Book Learning." Okay, so . . . let me get this straight. If you search an index of online information, you find that it leads you to . . . online information. Google is unable to index things that aren't on the web. And this is a hole? In Google? No. If The New York Times can't get its stuff located in Google because it doesn't archive it online, that's a decision being made at The New York Times. It would be exactly the same as a publication choosing not to use page numbers. Basically, you could foil The Reader's Guide To Periodical Literature or whatever indexing mechanism you like if you refused to use page numbers, but that would hardly reveal a flaw in the indexing system. Certainly, anyone who is actually going for a complete literature review needs to do more than type a couple of words into Google, for exactly this reason. And I think they do. But no method of searching for information, including the methods taught to me in the school library when I was in fifth grade and it was all about the card catalog, the aforementioned Reader's Guide, and the Ask A Librarian method, ever revealed every possible relevant source of information. This entire piece comes off to me like sniping and sour grapes, not to mention an effort to -- just as the title implies -- dig for things to bitch about in a resource that works remarkably well and has made it enormously easier for intelligent people who are willing to take thirty seconds to ask the right question to find information. Look, you can wonder all day about the reliability of information found online, and you can wonder all day about the risks involved in the evolving expectation that everything you will ever need to know can be found out casually in under five minutes. Google seems to me to be open to criticism for some of its ad practices (though I think they disclose paid placements more conspicuously and straightforwardly than anyone), and I frankly think it's creepy to think of any one entity getting as powerful as they are becoming, because it's just . . . not a good idea. But to me, despite all this, the "Google doesn't really get you what you're looking for" argument is a non-starter. Posted by Alison-Jane at July 17, 2003 05:45 AMComments
Alli -- you are a librarian's dream. You just restated what I have to say to patrons almost daily, only you said it much, much better. From this point forward, I intend to direct people to your journal instead of trying to explain why they weren't able to find the perfect opportunity by typing the word *jobs* into google. Posted by: Trash on July 17, 2003 09:15 AMYou should really post this on the Fray. I have repeated been disappointed by this kind of half-thought on Slate, and not just in this area. What they need is a good brain pan high colonic response like yours... Sincerely, Enter the Fray with caution. That said, the article now has several good Fray posts highlighted at the bottom with similar objections. They also have the author's response to these posts. However, mostly what he does is acknowledge that the objections are valid, but that his point was that Google skews towards particular *kinds* of results when given little to work with. Why, then, did he not just write about that in the first place? Posted by: Claudia on July 17, 2003 04:23 PMHis response to the Fray at the bottom of his article was, to me, even more annyoing than his article. "Folks, obviously, *obviously* you can refine searches on Google" is enormously condescending. It's like he's lecturing people for pointing out the huge gap in his logic. And then he makes a big deal out of where his blog appears when you search for "Steven". Who cares? Who would *ever* use as their sole search term a common first name? I think all he's shown is that Google is set up to use multiple-word searches instead of single-word searches. I wonder exactly what algorithm he'd suggest for searching the entire Internet by a single word. Posted by: Monty on July 17, 2003 05:43 PMThat's it exactly, to me. It's like . . . either he's tried to make a point (Google has substantial usability/effectiveness issues) about which he's just wrong, or he's made a point (Google doesn't do very well searching the entire Internet for the word "Steve") about which no one could possibly care. Either way? Not a great piece of writing. Posted by: Alli on July 17, 2003 06:03 PMYes, gawd, just how stupid is Steve Johnson? His reply to the responses is to say that "you can refine searches on Google," but in my universe, a search term like "Fiona Apple" is not a "refined search term," just an *intelligent*, *appropriate* one. I mean, jeez, for the love of all that's unholy. Posted by: corgi-ears on July 18, 2003 06:05 AMPost a comment
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