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Librarianship after Google
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for October 2002
Isn’t it remarkable how quickly Google got adopted and became seemingly indispensable to many librarians? It seems like only yesterday that we all had a different favorite search engine every few months. I admit to dalliances with the likes of HotBot and AltaVista and Lycos and then AltaVista again—not to mention the occasional metasearch fling with Dogpile—but once I met Google, infatuation set in and I never looked back.
What’s not to like? It’s easy to use, based on simple but powerful ideas, and free. Not only free-free, but still free of banner ads, pop-up ads, plug-in requests, weird spinning animated graphics, and the other sludge of the Web these days (although I do love the special-day logos, especially the moose last Canada Day). Yes, they sell preferred search position, but that’s easily ignored and once in a while even helps; I’ve used it to determine the major players in an industry or area.
New features seem to crop up regularly as well. I only recently discovered that searching on a phone number or address executes a decent reverse-directory search; the image search is a lovely feature; and now there’s language-based searching, rudimentary translation, and interfaces in dozens of languages (try Klingon, or Elmer Fudd). And that toolbar! Where has that been my whole life? I downloaded that and the world changed, the sky was bluer, my food tasted better. Love at first sight.
In fact, when you think about it, isn’t Google kind of what we always wanted in an information system? Very forgiving, user-friendly, able to take a few well-chosen keywords and produce, often, a decent set of results with something genuinely useful within the first 10 hits, containing a wide variety of documents and document types, from all over the world. Sure, it doesn’t have professional-level indexing or controlled vocabulary or the niceties of systems we grew up with; but c’mon, it’s not all that bad.
And yet. . .
So now what? I find myself wondering. Is Google a big-enough deal to fundamentally affect our practice? It’s a daily tool for lots of people; for some it’s perhaps more frequently used than any other tool except the local catalog and broad-spectrum databases.
I wonder about how it lets us search. Google allows us to look for things we never would have been able to, or even thought of, before. I don’t even think twice now about searching for phrases buried deep within documents, knowing I’m searching over 2 billion Web pages, using strategies that would have been punishingly expensive and time-consuming on Dialog. That’s potent stuff; but at the same time, it doesn’t allow anything approaching proximity searching and actively discourages Boolean searching—techniques we know are very powerful but which must be used with care and take time to learn and that we consider to be professional signatures. Will this have an impact on our searching skills and performance?
Since Web stuff is now relatively easy to find—not only for us but also for normal folks who don’t do this for a living or care much about searching—people will continue to turn to Google, and thus the Web, for their information needs. Will that also mean that the kinds of professional-level resources we rely on—ProQuest, Lexis/Nexis, EbscoHost, and their kind—will then be less used, even though we pay big bucks and make them available for our communities? We know lots of people don’t search Google all that well; will our skills and experience be more valuable in helping them use them, or will they even think of asking?
What to do? I would love to see us work with the Google folks. We have many similar goals, getting people help in finding information they want chief among them. If we can align with them to achieve those goals in mutually beneficial ways, it could create a real sea change—not only in librarianship but on the Web as well.
It seems inevitable that Google, and its successors, will profoundly affect search practice, and, in a smaller way, librarianship. Perhaps the more important question is how we might be able to affect them. Our imprimatur could drive even more traffic their way and vice versa (imagine “Your Library” on the Google toolbar), we could help them to make their “Answers” service work (are the Question Pointpeople listening?), and heaven knows they could help us too. They also seem like darn nice people having a good time and doing good work; we’d have little to lose in approaching them.
A final thought: One has to ponder Google’s business model. They’re privately held, so we don’t know much about their finances; they must be generating revenue from licensing their technology and selling some search position, but what would happen if they went under one day? A proposition to chill the blood, but that’s another story.
Worth reading
If you’re interested in how Google really works, take the guided tour by their Chief Operations Engineer. The more technically minded might like the original 1998 paper written by Google’s founders.
Worth viewing
www.dictionaraoke.org. Useful? No. Fun? Yes.