[LINK] Google Inadequacies [Was Re: Tony and ANU]

[Tom Worthington]

At 10:24 AM 23/02/2009, Roger Clarke wrote:
>... Google search-service is arguably the *worst* that has ever been 
>invented - even from the
>semi-skilled user's perspective (and specialists must be appalled by 
>what they see). ...

I will argue about that. The Google search service is very simple and 
much better than the complicated ones the specialists forced on us 
for years. All you do is type some words into the box and press "search".

Often I paste, rather than type, into the box. This is when someone 
sends me a message asking me for advice on something I have never 
heard of: I paste their query into Google and usually it comes up 
with something relevant. I then summarize what Google found and send 
the result back. The questioner thinks I am very knowledgeable about 
a topic I did not even know existed a few minutes before. But then 
the search designers have been using my content for the past decade 
to test search engines (including the university lab where Google 
came from) so it is not surprising they work for me.

Before such search engines, knowledge retrieval experts, such as 
librarians, made us use complicated search systems. The Australian 
Parliament had one which I could never understand, having lots of 
boxes with complicated labels on them. I used to type what I wanted 
into the first box, ignore the rest and hope for the best.

>I've been using the ANU's copy of Panoptic/Funnelback as the 
>standard, and measuring Google's service against it. ...

Panoptic is wonderful technology, but perhaps I am not academic 
enough as I often don't understand what it is giving me, or why. I 
usually end up using Google to do searches for organisation web 
sites, rather than their own search facility.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University