Google

Is Metasearch Dead? : 

Roy Tennant California Digital Library Is Metasearch Dead?

Outline : 

Outline What Really Drives Google What Google Scholar Is What Google Scholar is Not Google Scholar as Commercial Database Replacement Google Scholar as a Metasearch Replacement In the End…

What Google Scholar Is : 

What Google Scholar Is “Scholarly” information: journal articles, papers, books, dissertations, technical reports, etc. Non-scholarly information cited by scholarly sources One of many Google initiatives/tools/ projects, and one that is not particularly well-supported A web crawl of content deemed appropriate, with citations parsed from full-text A demonstration of supreme faith in the efficacy of web crawling and full-text parsing An experiment

What Google Scholar is Not : 

What Google Scholar is Not A human-created abstracting and indexing service A service with: Authority control Assigned subject terms from a controlled vocabulary Ability to limit a search to a Many of the features that most commercial databases provide

Google Scholar as Commercial Database Replacement : 

Google Scholar as Commercial Database Replacement Coverage/Scope Results Ranking Relevance Features

Coverage/Scope : 

Coverage/Scope ? “The underlying problem with Google Scholar is that Google is as secretive about its coverage as the North Korean Government about famine in the country.”— Péter Jacsó, Online Information Review, 29(2) (2005), p.209.

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Results Ranking

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7th entry

Relevance : 

Relevance Google attempts to put the most relevant first (using a secret algorithm) based heavily on citation counts Older items tend to sift to the top No way for the user to “dial in” different weighting, or sort by different criteria “Relevance” also has more dimensions than simply query terms

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Relevance for a particular audience…

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…and/or purpose

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First page:Zero results with general information on tsunamis that an undergraduate would find useful

First page:3 results with useful information7 relief effort sitesAt least 7 sponsored links (ads) : 

First page:3 results with useful information7 relief effort sitesAt least 7 sponsored links (ads)

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First page:20 sites with useful information

Features : 

Features What features? Limited ability to focus search (e.g., Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities all together) No ability to: Sort or group results Email citations Download citations Reformat citations To even see citations

Google Scholar as Metasearch : 

Google Scholar as Metasearch Success is as much about what you don’t search as what you do Libraries need the ability to unify searching of hetereogenous sources that apply to a specific audience and/or purpose Many of those sources will never be in Google Scholar Google Scholar is to scholarly information access what McDonald’s is to food

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In the End…