Whither Google? - Ingenta Connect

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60   Advisor Reports from the Field  /  The Charleston Advisor  /  April 2013

www.charlestonco.com

Advisor Reports from the Field

Whither Google? doi:10.5260/chara.14.4.60

By Dennis Brunning (TCA Contributing Editor, Arizona State University)

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n January 2012, the good folks of the Colorado State University at Ft. Collins and Google’s Boulder office leveraged geographic propinquity and a zest for educational technology for two Google seminars, one on Google Search and the second on Google Earth. The inaugural seminar featured a lunch keynote from Dr. Daniel M. Russell, Google’s Uber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness. Dr. Russell fleshed out more details about Google for librarians, especially concerning Google’s future and its impact on libraries. (Note: CSU has archived the seminar as part of its Libguide for Google Search, which includes other useful Webinars as well.) The question: Why was I there? Why were we there? It’s a good bet that we librarians were there because of a natural curiosity for how things work. And let’s face it; Google competes in what used to be our exclusive terrain. We were there first, for over several millenniums. It was a great ride, creating user value through professionalism, knowledge management, and trust, by all sorts of institutions, that a place run by people for people was a social good. Stunning how the technological developments over two decades turned our world over. If you are an educator, you need to deal with Google as a research, teaching, and homework tool immediately. It’s part of the teaching territory. Just about every “digital native” understands that you “Google” your research. Okay, so those of us who teach the teachers and serve library users, why were we there? Cognitive dissonance theory would explain that our expertise and Google are dissonant; they don’t align. We need consonance so we want to learn that Google is more like us. I recommend CSU Pueblo’s Libguide on Google Search () for good starting points on what we learn from Google’s educational outreach; more, it’s a great introduction to Google’s ongoing effort to train teachers and librarians into what Google does and how it does it. So what did we learn from our Google day at the foot of the Rockies? Google educators are millennials, taught and graduated at the cusp of the analog world going digital. The questions and answers are on the Web. When not attending a conference or seminar they engage the world through their screens. If not discoverable from a little critical thinking and some keywords in a Google product search box it isn’t worth knowing. The secrets to power search are the filters on the left side of “native” search, predictive searching (what I want is there I just have to think predicatively, or imagine it should be there, somewhere). Google’s power rests on accurate mapping of about two hundred signals from Web pages to user key words. We will never know what or how these signals work. Quotation marks, much favored by librarians and power searches, may reduce relevance. Google now employs multitiered inverse indexes which paradoxically put low “signal” pages which may be what



you want but Google has determined most users would not find relevant. Three other findings from the day include: ■■

Google Earth will for the foreseeable future remain a software browser plug-in;

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phrases in natural language don’t work well;

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and user trust is critical to Google’s continuing use.

If all the above makes eminent sense, you’ve no need to read further; you understand Google. If not, though, here is the skinny. Google is all about those little text ads that appear in the margins of Google and Gmail searches. These contribute to 97% of Google’s annual multibillion dollar revenues. What we know as a Google search gets this done. The rest is Google pointing programming sabers against the Web’s windmill. They are information sideshows. The question “why did we get this result?” is a sensitive and complicated problem for Google trainers. It’s like demanding the magician explain how the rabbits and doves emerge in profusion from a top hat. Or where the pretty assistant goes when stepping into the mirrored booth. Listening to Google teachers is different from listening to a librarian instructing online searching or a library vendor pitching a product. A typical library database indexes a finite content set; also, it is structured data. In contrast, Google indexes Web pages and links in and out from these pages. If it ain’t a Web page, Google is blind. This presents us with an inherent puzzle. What we need and want to find lies outside Google’s search engine. You can reach out forever, explain the simple search fields, suggest tips for commonly asked questions, and a wink or two about odd but true methods that astound and delight. Unfortunately, you’ll never know exactly why you discovered your information, only that Google got you there. It’s like a sugar high in search. And there is not a great deal to the teaching moment, only use it and prosper. At press, Google is taking market cap from Apple, heading for 1,000.00 Lingering, though, is nowhere else for growth and your cheap money to return easy money. They’ve also announced a streaming music service with some big players signed up . With such business moves it’s hard to see them as a neutral search service whose role is to organize information. How Google will reconcile this with its teaching mission is probably what we want and need to know. But Kudos to CSU for its annual effort of putting a face to Google. As the Boss sang, we need “someone to talk to, just a little of that human touch.” Of course Springsteen pointed out, in the LP released at the same time as Human Touch: “Lucky Town, that’s where you lose the blues you found.” Just click I’m Feeling Lucky when you got the Google search blues.  n