From: Joshua E. Richardson (jer@anshen.com)
Date: Thu Feb 19 2004 - 11:02:19 PST
Subject: RE: SLA-SF: FW: [CALIX:1901] Re: Google Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 11:02:19 -0800 Message-ID: <B66707A0F820854283FFA2AEDAB9D94A0221B0@ex-01.anshen.com> From: "Joshua E. Richardson" <jer@anshen.com>
Thanks, Deb.
I've already gotten a bunch of e-mails asking about my presentation. While I don't have much to offer of the presentation itself, I can recommend that everyone familiarize themselves with the features Google itself makes available:
http://www.google.com/help/index.html
...as well as a great O'Reilly publication entitled, "Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools". It's a bit geared towards power-users, but hey, that's what we Librarians/Information Specialists are all about!
-Joshua
Joshua E. Richardson
Information Specialist
Anshen+Allen Architects
vox +1.415.281.5427
fax +1.415.882.9523
www.anshen.com <http://www.anshen.com/>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Deborah Hunt [mailto:dhunt@exploratorium.edu]
> Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2004 10:35 AM
> To: SLA/SF Listserv
> Subject: RE: SLA-SF: FW: [CALIX:1901] Re: Google
>
>
> Dear Joshua,
> This is exactly the thing all librarians and information
> professionals should be doing.
> Rather than lament the fact that our users think that Google is the
> end all to searching, inform them with events such as the one Joshua
> mentioned.
> Brownbags are an easy vehicle for this as is the upcoming
> International Special Librarians Day in April.
> Way to go, Joshua!
> Deb
>
> At 9:40 AM -0800 2/19/04, Joshua E. Richardson wrote:
> >The funny thing is that while pundits argue how Google is overtaking
> >library services, they fail to mention that general users also
> >don't really know how to use Google! Such was/is the case at my
> >work. A way I was able to promote the Library in my firm was to make
> >a brown bag lunch presentation on Google searching, tricks and tips
> >and stuff. It was well attended and well received. Future
> >presentations are in the works.
> >-Joshua
> >
> >Joshua E. Richardson
> >Information Specialist
> >Anshen+Allen Architects
> >vox +1.415.281.5427
> >fax +1.415.882.9523
> ><http://www.anshen.com/>www.anshen.com
> >
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Karin Zilla [mailto:karinz@certifiedemployment.com]
> >Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 9:26 AM
> >To: SLA Listserve
> >Subject: SLA-SF: FW: [CALIX:1901] Re: Google
> >
> >Some of you may find this posting to the Calif. Librarians list of
> >interest. The Washington Post very long article is quite a
> >compelling read. --Karin
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: owner-calix@listproc.sjsu.edu
> >[mailto:owner-calix@listproc.sjsu.edu]On Behalf Of KTDyer@aol.com
> >Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2004 10:56 PM
> >To: calix@listproc.sjsu.edu; CALTAC@yahoogroups.com
> >Cc: KTDyer@aol.com
> >Subject: [CALIX:1901] Re: Google
> >
> >Small rebuttal: (1) My local library reference librarian can find
> >something for me faster than I can find it on Google. (2) Google
> >has a reputation for accumulating more information than necessary
> >about people and making it available to others. (3) Dogile, Net
> >Vista and others are just as good. (4) Use lii.org (Librarian's
> >Index to the Internet) where every site listed has been checked as
> >to its veracity. (5) Libraries are more than the Internet; the
> >Internet is a tool. (6) Libraries offer preschool storytimes,
> >elementary school programs, outreach to seniors, community rooms for
> >everyone from those belong to AA to those attending a Zen class. A
> >library is a place of peace--a space--that no machine can replace.
> >This article makes me want to advocate harder for more hours,
> >services and staff for libraries, the only truly nondiscriminatory,
> >trusting, bastion of democracy, available to us whether we have
> >Internet access elsewhere or not. There is no "digital divide" in
> >the library. --Karen Dyer
> >
> > washingtonpost.com
> >
> >Search For Tomorrow
> >We Wanted Answers, And Google Really Clicked. What's Next?
> >
> >By Joel Achenbach
> >Washington Post Staff Writer
> >Sunday, February 15, 2004; Page D01
> >
> >In the beginning -- before Google -- a darkness was upon the land.
> >
> >We stumbled around in libraries. We lifted from the World Book
> >Encyclopedia. We paged through the nearly microscopic listings in
> >the heavy green volumes of the Readers' Guide to Periodical
> >Literature. We latched onto hearsay and rumor and the thinly sourced
> >mutterings of people alleged to be experts. We guessed. We
> >conjectured. And then we gave up, consigning ourselves to ignorance.
> >
> >Only now in the bright light of the Google Era do we see how dim and
> >gloomy was our pregooglian world. In the distant future, historians
> >will have a common term for the period prior to the appearance of
> >Google: the Dark Ages.
> >
> >There have been many fine Internet search engines over the years --
> >Yahoo!, AltaVista, Lycos, Infoseek, Ask Jeeves and so on -- but
> >Google is the first to become a utility, a basic piece of societal
> >infrastructure like the power grid, sewer lines and the Internet
> >itself.
> >
> >People keep finding new ways to use Google. It is now routine for
> >the romantically savvy to Google a prospective date. "Google
> >hackers" use the infiltrative powers of Google to pilfer bank
> >records and Social Security numbers. The vain Google themselves.
> >
> >It was about three years ago that the transitive verb "to Google"
> >entered the lexicon, but it was only last year that Google passed
> >all rival search engines in the number of queries handled -- now
> >upwards of 200 million a day. So phenomenal is its success that some
> >industry watchers think an initial public offering of Google stock
> >could raise $20 billion and trigger a second dot-com boom.
> >
> >"You build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your
> >door," Stewart Brand, computer guru and president of the Long Now
> >Foundation, says of Google. "A wider path, I think, has never been
> >beaten in the history of the world. It's an astonishing mousetrap
> >story."
> >
> >In the dot-com world, nothing stays the same for long, and it's not
> >clear that Google will forever maintain its dominance over such
> >ferocious rivals as Yahoo! and Microsoft. But the business story of
> >Google is less interesting than the technological one: If
> >information is power, then Google has helped change the world.
> >Knowledge is measurably easier to obtain. Google works. Google knows.
> >
> >The world used to be transformed by voyages of discovery, religious
> >movements, epidemic globe-circling diseases, the whims of kings and
> >the depredations of armies. But over the centuries, technology has
> >emerged as the primary change agent, the thing that can shrink a
> >planet, undermine dictators and turn 14-year-olds into publishers.
> >
> >The question is, who's going to build the next mousetrap? What will
> >it do? The laboratories of Internet companies are furiously trying
> >to come up with the next generation of search engine. Whatever it is
> >and whatever it's called, it will likely make the current Google
> >searches seem as antiquated as cranking car engines by hand.
> >
> >Mom, What's a Library?
> >
> >
> >The transition into the Google Era has not occurred without some
> >anguish. The stacks of a university library can be a rather lonely
> >place these days. Library circulation dropped about 20 percent at
> >major universities in the first five years after Internet search
> >engines became popular. For most students, Google is where all
> >research begins (and, for the frat boys, ends).
> >
> >A generation ago, reference librarians -- flesh-and-blood creatures
> >-- were the most powerful search engines on the planet. But the rise
> >of robotic search engines in the mid-1990s has removed the human
> >mediators between researchers and information. Librarians are not so
> >sure they approve. Much of the material on the World Wide Web is
> >wrong, or crazy, or of questionable provenance, or simply out of
> >date (odd to say this about a new technology, but the Web is full of
> >stale information).
> >
> >"How do you authenticate what you're looking at? How do you know
> >this isn't some kind of fly-by-night operation that's put up this
> >Web site?" asks librarian Patricia Wand of American University.
> >
> >Students typically search only the most obvious parts of the Web,
> >and rarely venture into what is sometimes called the "Dark Web," the
> >walled gardens of information accessible only through specific
> >databases, such as Lexis-Nexis or the Oxford English Dictionary. And
> >most old books remain undigitized. The Library of Congress has about
> >19 million books with unique call numbers, plus another 9 million or
> >so in unusual formats, but most have not made it onto the Web. That
> >may change, but for the moment, a tremendous amount of human wisdom
> >is invisible to researchers who just use the Internet.
> >
> >"For a lot of kids today, the world started in 1996," says librarian
> >and author Gary Price.
> >
> >And yet Berkeley professor Peter Lyman points out that traditional
> >sources of information, such as textbooks, are heavily filtered by
> >committees, and are full of "compromised information." He's not so
> >sure that the robotic Web crawlers give results any worse than those
> >from more traditional sources.
> >
> >"There's been a culture war between librarians and computer
> >scientists," Lyman says.
> >
> >And the war is over, he adds.
> >
> >"Google won."
> >Advanced Search
> >
> >
> >In the early days of search engines, finding information was like
> >fishing in a canal: You might hook something good, but you were just
> >as likely to reel in an old tin can or a rubber boot. Now you often
> >find exactly what you want.
> >
> >One reason Google works so well today is that there's so much for
> >its robotic crawlers to explore. Google initially searched about 20
> >million Web pages; the company's home page now boasts that it
> >searches 3,307,998,701 pages.
> >
> >"In 1996, if you tried to Google someone, if Google existed, it
> >wouldn't have been a very satisfying experience," says Seth Godin,
> >author of a number of best-selling e-books. "We hit a critical mass
> >of really valuable stuff that was online, I think, about 2000."
> >
> >The expansion of the information universe makes the navigational
> >tool all the more valuable. And yet the search function at first
> >seemed to be an unglamorous computer application. The pioneering
> >search engine companies, including Yahoo!, Excite, AltaVista and
> >Lycos, wanted to transform themselves into something snazzier, a
> >"portal," the full gee-whiz Internet Century home page that would
> >offer the user a link to everything between here and Neptune, plus
> >plane tickets.
> >
> >But the history of computer technology is full of companies that
> >failed to see the potential glory right in front of them. In the
> >early 1980s, IBM thought that the "operating system" within the
> >computer wasn't nearly as important as the hardware, the box itself.
> >And then Microsoft, which benefited from that oversight, became so
> >focused on software programs that it was slow to capitalize on the
> >Internet revolution, leaving Netscape to create the first commercial
> >Web browser. And then almost everyone underestimated Search.
> >
> >Not Google. When the company debuted in September 1998, it looked
> >like a throwback. This wasn't a portal. The home page showed mostly
> >white space, anchored by a little rectangle, a box, perfectly blank.
> >Fill in blank and get results. This was plain ol' boring Search,
> >without news headlines, plane tickets, e-mail or any other bells and
> >whistles.
> >
> >But what results! Google has farms of computers working in parallel.
> >You can put in a couple of words and -- gzzzzt! -- get 600,000-plus
> >results within some preposterously brief amount of time. (Google
> >brags about it: "Search took 0.17 seconds." Showoffs!)
> >
> >Google, the creation of Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and
> >Larry Page, is like many other search engines in its basic
> >operation. It has powerful software programs that automatically
> >"crawl" the Web, clicking on every possible link, scouting the
> >terrain. What has made Google special is that, in assessing the
> >quality of sites, it takes note of how many other pages link to any
> >given page. This is an old idea from academia, called citation
> >analysis. If many Web sites link to a particular page, the page
> >rises in Google's vaunted "page rank" and is more likely to be on
> >the first page of the search results.
> >
> >"You're getting the advantage of the group mind," says Paul Saffo, a
> >research director at the Institute for the Future.
> >
> >This is a key concept: As the Web has grown, it has developed a kind
> >of embedded wisdom. Obviously the Web isn't a conscious entity, but
> >neither is it a completely random pile of stuff. The way one part
> >links to another reflects the preferences of Web users -- and Google
> >tapped into that. Google, in detecting patterns on the Web,
> >harvested meaning from all that madness.
> >
> >This points the way to one of the next big leaps for search engines:
> >finding meaning in the way a single person searches the Web. In
> >other words, the search engines will study the user's queries and
> >Web habits and, over time, personalize all future searches. Right
> >now, Google and the other search engines don't really know their
> >users.
> >
> >For example, Saffo isn't really interested in the stuff that most
> >people look for when they do a Web search. He's one of the premier
> >futurists of Silicon Valley and fondly recalls the days, back in the
> >1980s and early 1990s, the pre-Web era, when the Internet was the
> >reserve of the technological elite who posted their brilliant
> >thoughts on electronic bulletin boards. Now, everyone from about
> >third grade up has an e-mail address and loiters around the Web as
> >though it's the corner 7-Eleven. The results of a Web search reflect
> >the tastes of a broad swath of ordinary Americans who in some cases
> >are still wearing short pants.
> >
> >"The more people get on the Web, the more the Web becomes the vaster
> >wasteland that is the successor to the vast wasteland of television.
> >I don't care what the majority of people are looking at, because the
> >majority of people are really boring," Saffo says.
> >
> >He needs a better search engine. He needs one that knows that he's a
> >big-brain tech guru and not an eighth-grader with a paper due.
> >
> >"The field is called user modeling," says Dan Gruhl of IBM. "It's
> >all about computers watching interactions with people to try to
> >understand their interests and something about them."
> >
> >Imagine a version of Google that's got a bit of TiVo in it: It
> >doesn't require you to pose a query. It already knows! It's one step
> >ahead of you. It has learned your habits and thought processes and
> >interests. It's your secretary, your colleague, your counselor, your
> >own graduate student doing research for which you'll get all the
> >credit.
> >
> >To put it in computer terminology, it is your intelligent agent.
> >Calling Agent 001101
> >
> >
> >No one knows how the intelligent agents of the future might really
> >work, and once you venture more than a few months out you're already
> >into some seriously fuzzy territory. But you might imagine that this
> >intelligent agent could gradually take on so many characteristics of
> >your mind that it becomes something of a digital doppelganger, your
> >shadow self.
> >
> >To borrow and slightly distort something from "Star Trek," it's like
> >your personal digital Borg, having absorbed your thoughts and melded
> >them with an existing software program.
> >
> >Perhaps this digital self could become a commodity, something
> >marketable. Imagine that you have to write a paper for a class about
> >the future of search engines. You don't want to use your own lame,
> >broken-down, distracted, gummed-up-with-stupid-stuff virtual
> >secretary to do your research. You want to download Bill Gates's
> >intelligent agent, or Paul Saffo's, or Sergey Brin's, to help you
> >ask smarter questions and find the best answers.
> >
> >There are primitive intelligent agents already. Amazon.com makes
> >book recommendations based on your previous purchases and the
> >judgments of others who have liked the same books you've liked. But
> >this form of collaborative filtering is still fairly crude.
> >
> >Microsoft senior researcher Eric Horvitz describes a variety of new
> >and future technologies in which software is more active, more of an
> >entity, no longer just some inert codes waiting for the user to
> >issue a command. For example, there's a program he already uses
> >called IQ, for "implicit query."
> >
> >"As you're working, we continue to formulate queries in the
> >background, that the user doesn't even know about. They're happening
> >very quietly," Horvitz says.
> >
> >But Horvitz is keenly aware that people don't want a program that's
> >too pushy, that's constantly interrupting. Humans have limited
> >powers of attention. Software, says Horvitz, "needs to be endowed
> >with the kind of common courtesies we'd expect from a well-mannered
> >colleague."
> >
> >And lurking over the future of such programs is the dilemma of
> >privacy. There's valuable information in the way people use the Web,
> >but they may not want others, or even a machine, to pay close
> >attention to every place they venture. How do you create an
> >intelligent agent that knows when to look away? How do you avoid
> >what Horvitz calls the "monster possibilities"?
> >
> >What everyone wants is a reasonable, discreet intelligent agent,
> >like an English butler. It should be one that can get things
> >accomplished, to take the extra steps even without being prompted.
> >
> >"I don't think anyone wants a search engine," says Seth Godin. "I
> >think people want a find engine."
> >
> >Find, and do. Solve problems. Make it so.
> >
> >"I often use the analogy of Web agents being like travel agents,"
> >says James Hendler, a computer science professor at the University
> >of Maryland. "When I go to my travel agent and say where I want to
> >go, they don't usually just say, 'Yes, you can get there.' They give
> >me some options of different ways to get there. They think about
> >some things I might have forgotten. Do I need a car, do I need a
> >hotel reservation? And then they go do it for me."
> >
> >Computers as a general rule do only what they're told to do. They
> >don't have artificial intelligence in the classic sense. They have
> >no common sense. IBM's Gruhl, the chief architect of a new product
> >called WebFountain, points out that no computer has ever learned
> >what any 2-year-old human knows.
> >
> >A computer, he says, can become easily confused by the sentence
> >"Tommy hit a boy with a broken leg." The computer doesn't understand
> >that a broken leg is not going to be an instrument used in an
> >attack. "Common sense, how the world works, even something like
> >irony, are very difficult for computers to understand," says Gruhl.
> >Semantic Discussions
> >
> >
> >To achieve common sense, the Web needs to go through the infantile
> >process of self-discovery. The Web doesn't really understand itself.
> >There's lots of information on the Web, but not much "information
> >about information," also known as "metadata."
> >
> >If you're a robotic search engine, you look for words in the text of
> >a page, but ideally the page would have all manner of encoded labels
> >that describe who wrote the material, and why, and when, and for
> >what purpose, and in what context.
> >
> >Hendler explains the problem this way: If you type into Google the
> >words "how many cows in Texas," Google will rummage through sites
> >with the words "cow" and "many" and "Texas," and so forth, but you
> >may have trouble finding out how many cows there are in Texas. The
> >typical Web page involving cows and Texas doesn't have anything to
> >do with the larger concept of bovine demographics. (The first Google
> >result that comes up is an article titled "Mineral Supplementation
> >of Beef Cows in Texas" by the unbelievably named Dennis Herd.)
> >
> >Hendler, along with World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, is
> >working on the Semantic Web , a project to implant the background
> >tags, the metadata, on Web sites. The dream is to make it easier not
> >only for humans, but also machines, to search the Web. Moreover,
> >searches will go beyond text and look at music, films, and anything
> >else that's digitized. "We're trying to make the Web a little
> >smarter," Hendler says.
> >
> >But Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google, points out
> >that the current keyword-driven searching system, clumsy though it
> >may be and so heavily reliant on serendipity, still works well for
> >most situations.
> >
> >"Part of the problem is that keywords are so good," he says. "Most
> >of the time the words do what you want them to do."
> >
> >Billions of dollars are at stake in this race to invent the next
> >mousetrap, and Google faces serious challenges. Yahoo! has long had
> >a partnership with Google, using it to power many of its searches,
> >but Yahoo! has since acquired two other search engine companies, and
> >plans to drop Google in favor of its own Web crawlers. Microsoft,
> >meanwhile, is sure to make search a fundamental element of the next
> >version of its operating system , due in 2006 and code-named
> >Longhorn.
> >
> >Will Google get steamrolled like Netscape?
> >
> >"We spend most of our time worrying about ourselves and not our
> >competition," says Google's Norvig.
> >
> >Technology creates a horizon beyond which human destiny is
> >unknowable, because we can't anticipate all the crazy stuff that
> >brilliant people will invent. The author Michael Crichton has
> >pointed out that a person in the year 1900 might have contemplated
> >all the human beings who would be on the planet in the year 2000,
> >and wondered how it would be possible to obtain enough horses for
> >everyone.
> >
> >And where would they put all the horse droppings?
> >
> >Specific predictions are usually wrong. But a general trend has
> >emerged over the course of centuries: Information escapes
> >confinement. Information has been able to break free from
> >monasteries, libraries, school-board-sanctioned textbooks, and
> >corporate publishers. In the Middle Ages, books were kept chained to
> >desks. Information is now completely unchained.
> >
> >It has a life of its own -- and someday perhaps that won't
> be just a metaphor.
> >
> >© 2004 The Washington Post Company
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> Deborah Hunt
> Senior Information Specialist
> Exploratorium
> 3601 Lyon Street
> San Francisco, CA 94123
> Voice: 415-353-0485
> Fax: 415-561-0370
> mailto:dhunt@exploratorium.edu
>
> "A woman is like a tea bag; she never knows how strong she is
> until she's
> in hot water." Eleanor Roosevelt
>
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