Google Love
I have a close friend who’s a reference librarian in a public library. A patron recently asked who Carrie Fisher’s mother is. Well trained and skilled at choosing the most appropriate resource in all situations, he turned to Google. And queried: Carrie Fisher’s mother. While one has come to expect searches suggesting alternate spellings of search terms, he was shocked to find, after three “Carrie Fisher” results, a suggestion: See Results for Debbie Reynolds. What kind of Google wizardry is at work here? It seems unthinkable that there’s some person sitting at a California desk tweaking these type of searches (sounds like a perfect job for a MLIS intern); so the only conclusion is that Google has written an algorithm to make these semantic suggestions. Personally, I find it a bit creepy - I prefer to do my searching on my own and this has a big brother feel that makes me uneasy. BUT, I can appreciate that I’m probably in the minority on that and to most people this is pretty great.
Here’s a kicker to me. Try searching for “Carrie Fisher’s mother” in your local catalog. See anything remotely useful in those results? Try searching for Libary. Do you even get a spelling correction prompt? I doubt it. If Google can anticipate want we really want by a single ill-formed search and our own databases can’t even correct an embarassing spelling error - how can we blame our users for asking Google instead of us? I’m one of us and even I’m not convinced of our credibility.
An aside, as taught by a true searching guru in search school, I would’ve used “Carrie Fisher’s mother is”. And been awarded with the correct answer, but not the alternate search suggestion. Does this mean my two-year old education is out of date? Perish the thought.
Tags: google, online catalog, OPAC, reference, searching, spelling correction