Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Can't Find Your 404s?, Martin Klein, Frank Mccown, Joan Smith, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Presentations

PDF of a powerpoint presentation at the Santa Fe Complex, Santa Fe, New Mexico, March 13, 2009. Also available on Slideshare.

Get More Out Of Google Than It Gets Out Of You, Maureen Cahill

Presentations

The key to effectively using the Internet as a resource is first to know when to use it at all; and, only then, how to use it. The same may be said for Google, or any search engine. First, master the intricacies of when to use it; then, work on details of how to make it work well.

Attitudes Of Ohiolink Librarians Toward Google Scholar™, Joan Giglierano

Roesch Library Faculty Publications

Almost three years after Google Scholar's inception, only a third of Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK) member libraries link to it from their Web sites. This article reports the results of a July 2007 survey of OhioLINK academic librarians, conducted to find out about their attitudes and current practices regarding promotion of Google Scholar. It compares the findings about placement of Google Scholar on Web sites and inclusion in library instruction with previous research, and includes recommendations for libraries about Google Scholar.

Developing Electronic Collections With Shrinking Budgets (Doing More With Less), R Philip Reynolds

Librarian and Staff Presentations

A lot of this may seem like basic information that we all know but, Google changes features continually and it is often hard to keep up. When I last counted the Google services listed under More Google and under “Labs” I came up with seventy different products or services with fifty-two of those products being search related. How many of these are we really familiar with let alone their individual operators and capabilities? In their book Google Hacks Bausch, Calishain, Dornfest list hack #1 as being aware of and using the Google directory, #2 is Google Zeitgeist, #4 is the …

Google's Law, Greg Lastowka

Greg Lastowka

Google has become, for the majority of Americans, the index of choice for online information. Through dynamically generated results pages keyed to a near-infinite variety of search terms, Google steers our thoughts and our learning online. It tells us what words mean, what things look like, where to buy things, and who and what is most important to us. Google’s control over “results” constitutes an awesome ability to set the course of human knowledge. As this paper will explain, fortunes are won and lost based on Google’s results pages, including the fortunes of Google itself. Because Google’s results are so …

Google Sets, Google Suggest, And Google Search History: Three More Tools For The Reference Librarian's Bag Of Tricks, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This article examines the features, quirks, and uses of Google Sets, Google Suggest, and Google Search History and argues that these three lesser-known Google tools warrant inclusion in the resourceful reference librarian’s bag of tricks.

Want To See The Sites? Better Find A Better Guide: Do Popular Search Engines Return Librarian-Recommended Sites?, David C. Tyler, Scott Childers, Beth Mcneil, Alicia Dostal

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

This paper presents the results of a study of the utility of several popular search engines and of two newer search engines with respect to librarian-selected lists of Web resources and internet searching behaviors. This study addresses whether said resources are returned where internet searchers could reasonably be expected to find them and whether the search engines employed serve as acceptable substitutes for the expert advice of librarians. Search engines included in the study were Google, MSN.com, Yahoo, Lycos, AskJeeves, Icerocket, and Acoona. Searches for the study were based on the topics/titles of the “Internet Resources” columns from College and …

Is Google The Competition?, Carol Tenopir

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

LIBRARIANS, PUBLISHERS, and aggregators alike often call Google their main competitor. Google, or similar web search engines, is the information finding tool of first choice for many users--far ahead of proprietary online services or libraries and light years ahead of print sources.

The 2004 annual meeting of NFAIS (National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services) asked who would win the "battle for mindshare" in the year 2010. Will libraries, A&I (abstracting and indexing) services, and traditional publishers still exist, or will Google become the only information resource?

Searching And Search Engines: When Is Current Research Going To Lead To Major Progress?, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

For many years, users of commercial search engines have been hearing how the latest in information and computer science research is going to improve the quality of the engines they rely on for fulfilling their daily information needs. However, despite what is heard, these promises have not been fulfilled. While the Internet has dramatically increased the amount of information to which users now have access, the key issue appears to be unresolved – the results for substantive queries are not improving. However, the past need not predict the future because sophisticated advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have, in fact, …

Unlikely Partnerships, Carol Tenopir

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Two new partnerships have created unlikely and controversial relationships in the online information sector. Dow Jones Interactive is merging with Reuters Business Briefing to form Dow Jones Reuters Business Interactive. Northern Light is producing usgovsearch, a federal government information resource, through a partnership with the National Technical Information Service.

Benchmarking The Advanced Search Interfaces Of Eight Major Www Search Engines, John Felts, Randy D. Ralph

Library Faculty Publications

This research project was designed to benchmark the performance of the advanced search interfaces of eight of the major World Wide Web (WWW) search engines, excluding the meta engines. A review of the literature did not find any previous benchmarking studies of the advanced interfaces based on quantitative data. The research was performed by fifty-two graduate students of library and information studies (LIS) on three campuses of the University of North Carolina (UNC) as a class research project for course LIS 645, Computer-Related Technologies in Library Management. The class was offered by the Department of Library and Information Studies at …

Internet Infoglut And Invisible Ink: Spamdexing Search Engines With Meta Tags, Ira Nathenson

Ira Steven Nathenson

This Article addresses 'spamdexing,' namely, the practice of stuffing invisible keywords into webpages in order to try to get more favorable listings with search engines. For instance, some website owners will stuff the trademarks of competitors into a webpage’s code, particularly by using 'meta tags,' indexing keywords that can be hidden in a webpage’s source code. Although meta tags are not typically viewed by users, the code can be read by search engines, with the result that webpages may be improperly boosted in search engine rankings. Such practices can confuse the public and have also spurred trademark lawsuits. But the …