Google’s slow fade with librarians

Librarians have been interested in the Google Books project since it began in 2004. It was a heady time to be an information worker. Google used to actively court libraries, and librarians. They showed up at our conferences in 2005, tossed a lot of money around, pumped us for information, talked big talk about partnerships and the beautiful music we could all make together.

They added a librarian resource center to Google. It had a pretty cool URL, and a picture of a library on it. They knew our weaknesses. Things looked serious.

They whispered sweet nothings in our ears about how much we all had in common in a special newsletter just for librarians...


MORE from MEDIUM.com.

Use Google as a timer

Need a count-down timer? Just head on over to Google and enter “set timer for” and your length of time. You’ll get an on-screen count-down, a graphical status bar that fills in as your reach zero, and an audible alarm when your time’s up.

Library Use of the Mega Internet Sites, 2013 Edition

Primary Research Group, ISBN 978-157440-241-4

The study looks closely at how libraries are using Google, Pinterest, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon, Bing, Instagram, Vimeo, Twitter, Ebay and many other major internet sites. Just a few of the findings from the study are that:

• 4.17% of the libraries have workshops which teach patrons to use Craigslist
• 25% of the libraries sampled give workshops on how to use Wikipedia
• 90% of college libraries sampled give workshops on how to use Google Scholar.
• A third of legal and corporate libraries sampled considered Google Translate to be “highly useful”.
• Nearly 43% of libraries with an annual budget of more than $1 million considered Bing to be “highly useful”.
• The mean number of subscribers to the Twitter accounts of the libraries in the sample was 323.
• Non-USA libraries were much more likely than US-libraries to consider MySpace useful.
• About 23% of the libraries sampled had a YouTube account.
• Public libraries in the sample spent a mean of $8,000 ordering books from Amazon in the past year.
• 12.5% of libraries sampled use FlickR in their professional work.

The 160+ page study is available from Primary Research Group for $72.00. A pdf version of the report is currently available and a print version will be ready to ship on June 5, 2013 and can be ordered now. Site licenses are also available. Our reports can also be ordered through major book and Ebook distributors, as well as through major research report distributors. For a table of contents, list of participants, and free excerpt, or to place an order, visit our website at www.PrimaryResearch.com

A new Google Crisis Response project

Google Public Alerts is a platform designed to bring you relevant emergency alerts when and where you’re searching for them.

If a major weather event is headed for your area, you might go online to search for the information you need: What’s happening? Where and when will it strike? How severe will it be? What resources are available to help?

More HERE.

How to Use Google Search More Effectively

There's a lot more to efficient Googling. See this.

Google Map Maker of the United States

Using Map Maker, people have built out and edited the maps for 183 countries and regions around the world, and now, due to the contributions of citizen cartographers, 30 percent of people have detailed online maps of the places they live.

Map Maker users have mapped entire cities, road networks and universities that were never previously recorded online. These contributions have been incorporated into Google Maps and Google Earth, so the collective expertise of the Map Maker community benefits the millions of people using these products globally.

More HERE.

Free gov pubs online

The press release read: "Through a partnership among GSA, the U.S. Government Printing Office, and Google, 100 of the most popular government publications are now available to download for free online. This partnership will allow for greater access to these documents and contribute to an open and transparent government. As more documents become available online, it will eventually reduce the number of documents that GSA’s Federal Citizen Information Center prints while reducing costs and the environmental impact."

Sounds great! So I decided to check it out at pueblo.gpo.gov/FreePubs.php. I should note that one can order almost any of the physical items and receive them in one to three weeks, rather than writing to Pueblo, Colorado, like I used to.

First couple categories, Cars and Consumer Action Handbook, each had only one item, but one could click on the link and make a PDF.

But several areas had no such link. Under Small Business was Diversifying Your Workforce, with no link. What to do? Check out the FAQ!

"During this pilot program, we are limiting copies to one per person. However, you can download and print copies of government publications from Google Books (http://books.google.com) or order print copies of publications from the Federal Citizen Information Center (http://www.pueblo.gsa.gov) and the Government Printing Office Bookstore (http://bookstore.gpo.gov).

I tried Google Books first. The export citation choices were BiBTeX (.bibtex), EndNote (.enw), and RefMan (.ris); my computer recognized none of the extensions. At the FCIC/Pueblo site, not only did I find a PDF of the resource, but links to related items. I couldn't find the item at all at the GPO bookstore.

Next I looked for, under Money, the item Identity Theft and Your Social Security Number. Both Google books and FCIC/Pueblo led me to the Social Security page with a PDF link. Again, no luck at the GPO bookstore.

Your experiences may vary.

A Digital Library Better Than Google's

ON Tuesday, Denny Chin, a federal judge in Manhattan, rejected the settlement between Google, which aims to digitize every book ever published, and a group of authors and publishers who had sued the company for copyright infringement. This decision is a victory for the public good, preventing one company from monopolizing access to our common cultural heritage.

More HERE.

Search engine manipulations by "black hat SEOs

I saw on a listserv info about two very interesting articles on how criminal elements manipulate search engines, especially Google. Yet one more reason to use more than one search engine! The abstracts follow:

Groups magnify their chances in fight for hits

"What they're doing isn't wrong," says Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University law school. "The fault is Google's, which hasn't come up with an algorithm that screens out all this junk content."
[Google]'s Mr [Amit Singhal] calls this the problem of "brand recognition": where companies whose standing is based on their success in one area use this to "venture out into another class of information which they may not be as rich at". Google uses human raters to assess the quality of individual sites in order to counter this effect, he adds.
"There's good SEO, allowing people to get to more relevant content," says Google's Mr Singhal. "And then sometimes people do shitty things and sometimes our algorithms are fooled/
Source: Richard Waters. Financial Times. London (UK): Jul 13, 2010. pg. 16 / ft.com
***
Criminals take advantage of search algorithms

Professional criminals are increasingly likely to outflank legitimate companies in competing for Google's algorithmic attention, security professionals say. Criminal gangs use a more sinister form of search engine optimisation, duping Google and its rivals into serving as unwitting vehicles for delivering web surfers to malicious pages. Known as "black hat SEO", the art includes conventional tricks such as stuffing articles with keywords and amassing links from affiliate sites. But it goes much further: The bad guys steal content from legitimate pages and spin the content with new wording, which practitioners say makes them hard to distinguish from the real thing. They hack into trustworthy sites directly and link to their own pages from there, piggybacking on good reputations to get better rankings. They also use [Google]'s own disclosures against it, leaping on Google Trends, which indicates newly popular subjects for searches, to throw together bogus pages faster than real news-oriented pages appear. The number of bad links is tripling every year, with the majority on legitimate websites that have been hacked, according to Bradley Anstis, M86 vicepresident. He said Google could help by digging deeper into the websites it ranks, looking at individual pages within them. What Google sees, though, is different from what the end users see. The con artists can tell when a search engine is visiting the site and they show content laden with keywords. When a potential victim arrives via Google, the criminals pull a switch, redirecting the visitor to another page with bad code.

Source: Joseph Menn. Financial Times. London (UK): Jul 13, 2010. pg. 16 / ft.com

“My Library” Option on Google Book Search Will Be Searchable Again

...users were discussing how you could NO LONGER keyword search just the books you saved in your own library. In other words, the ability to develop a collection of titles from Google Book Search and then limit/restrict a search TO ONLY those titles was gone.

ResourceShelf was able to contact Google and we received an answer about this issue...

From Google’s Response:

Last month, we launched a new My Library that enabled users to create and then share collections of books by adding them to “bookshelves.” In the coming weeks, we’ll be restoring the ability to search within My Library by enabling users to search across all of their bookshelves as well...

Wikipedia wins the Google lottery - But Why?

Guardian Technology Blog

The Wikimedia Foundation - the organisation that runs Wikipedia- scored its own unexpected windfall yesterday, when it officially announced that Google was giving it a $2m grant.
...
For the website, the donation comes as the icing on the cake. Over the last few months, Wikipedia's been on a rather relentless fundraising drive that ended up bringing in $8m of cash to keep it going.

And it shouldn't be a complete surprise that Google is dipping into its pocket - after all, the internet goliath is not above supporting projects that help its users in some way. In the past it has pumped money into projects like Mozilla's Firefox and various university research projects.

But why Wikipedia?

Well, in general Google focuses on giving money to causes that will help make life better or easier for its users. That might be opening up a database that improves search results, offering a browser that is faster or more flexible than others, or finding new ways to collect and disseminate information.

Seen in that light, the Wikipedia grant is simple: the site's vast database of articles and search-engine friendly approach means it gets featured heavily in Google's results pages.
...

What is good for Wikipedia - making the site faster, more reliable and more accessible - helps Google's users get what they want, and is therefore good for the company itself. It's not a grant, it's an investment in making sure it can keep dominating search.

Update on Google Book Settlement

From NYLA:

The New York Library Association joined the Open Book Alliance (OBA), a coalition of organizations and companies seeking changes to the Google Book Settlement. NYLA supports efforts to making books more searchable, readable and downloadable, but believes the settlement was deeply flawed and benefited only a select few libraries who have signed their own deals with Google. For this reason, NYLA working with other members of the Open Book Alliance sought changes to the Google Book Settlement that would insure competitive pricing, improve access to all types of libraries and protect patron privacy. NYS Librarian Bernie Margolis also sent a letter to ALA voicing similar concerns with the deal.

The U.S. Dept. of Justice filed objections with Federal District Court Judge Denny Chin, who is overseeing the settlement case, that reflected many of the concerns raised by the Open Book Alliance. As a result of this outpouring of concern from author and library organizations, the U.S. and foreign governments, the parties to the Google Book Settlement are going back to the negotiating table to rework the deal.

Last week, the Federal Judge gave the parties until November 7th to address the concerns raised. Although it is good news that the original flawed deal is dead, the short time frame to revise the settlement and the lack of input from library representatives to the revision process is not a good sign. NYLA agrees with the Open Book Alliance that an issue of this magnitude should be dealt with in an open forum with the participation of all affected parties.

NYLA will continue to work with the Open Book Alliance and other groups to insure that any revised settlement addresses the concerns of the library community. Stay tuned!

Michael J. Borges
Executive Director
New York Library Association

Are Dictionaries Becoming Obsolete?

From the Wall Street Journal.

Do we still need dictionaries in the age of Google?

Dictionaries are, after all, giant databases of words compiled by lexicographers who investigate word usages and meanings.

These days, however, Google is our database of meaning. Want to know how to spell assiduous? Type it incorrectly and Google will reply, in its kind-hearted way: "Did you mean: assiduous"? Why yes, Google, I did.

Google Starts Begins Making Public Data Easier to Access, Visual

Google is adding search power to public data. The new public records search and visualization service (it's in the very early stages of development) went live Tuesday afternoon. Check it out.

Revolutionary British search engine will be 'as important as Google'

By Claire Bates

A renowned British physicist is launching a new internet search engine in May, which experts said could be as important as Google.

Professor Stephen Wolfram, founder of software company Wolfram Research, announced that work was almost finished on the first phase of his 'computational knowledge engine.'

Most search engines like Google and Yahoo scan through billions of web pages for keywords or phrases and return a series of documents that may contain the answer to your question, or point you in the right direction.

'We can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can’t figure anything new out,' Professor Wolfram said.

However, the London-born physicist claims his website 'Wolfram Alpha' can understand what you are looking for and calculate a single precise answer.


The entire article can be read at

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Is Cuil Cool?

A new search engine, Cuil - pronounced "cool" - started today. You can read all about its claims of being "better than Google" here and here, among many other places. Apparently, it was having start-up jityters, as one person indicated that one couldn't access it at all fotr a time.

But I got through and tried New York State Small Business Development Center; it actually suggested the whole name after I had typed New York State Sm

My result:
We didn’t find any results for "New York State Small Business Development Center"
Some reasons might be...

a typo. Please check your spelling.
your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.
Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.

It’s the first item on Google. Meh.

And as a matter of vanity, I cuiled my blogs and they showed on the 7th page, while they're on the first page on Google.

As this writer noted: Cuil Not So Cool.

Google vs. educational databases and libraries

"A fellow teacher asked me the other day as he was planning a research project for his class, Which is better, Google, or one of the databases we subscribe to?" The answer? See here.
***
The Library in the New Age, Robert Darnton

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 10 · June 12, 2008

Why we still need librarians

Is the Smarter & more Intelligent "Google generation" a myth?