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June 4, 2007

Search engine 'mindshare'

Top 3 online scientific search resources: librarians VS scientists. Click for larger view

According to a 2004 presentation at a National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services (NFAIS) conference, there's a huge discrepancy between librarian's percetions of a "good" online science resource as compared to scientist's perceptions. Why is this? I have a few theories... Read on.

Theory one: the path of least resistance is the path most researchers will take. This one's pretty straightforward. If a resource is easy to use and still returns acceptable results, it stands to reason that users will gravitate to this "easier" resource

Theory two: library information is scattered amongst multiple databases each with it's own interface. Think about it... Even at a relatively small school like Seton Hill, we have multiple interfaces to deal with. Imagine a large library at the likes of Penn State, Ohio State, University of Michingan, etc. Timothy Burke, history professor at Swarthmore, in his piece called "Burn the Catalog" offers the following comments relevant to these multiple interfaces:

Electronic catalogs, wherever you go in the academic world, have become a horrible crazy-quilt assemblage of incompatible interfaces and vendor-constrained listings. Working through Tripod’s article and specialized subject indices, in a relatively small collection, you still have to navigate at least five completely different interfaces for searching.

Theory three: Google and Yahoo! not only work, they work well (especially for scientific and technical information). My gosh..... Could this be? I think so... I've heard many librarians criticize Google from the direction of the number of hits that a typical search returns -- "A search on 'hurricane' returns 52,800,000 results! How can we make sense of that???!!!". I would argue that the number of hits is irrelevant -- most people don't ever go beyond the first results screen anyhow. I'm more impressed with the fact that among the first 10 results, there are links to the National Hurricane Center, FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), and NOAA (Natrional Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration) websites.

While I'm certainly not encouraging users to rely exclusively on Google, Yahoo! et al, I do believe there are some lessons to be learned here.

Posted by AnthonyMcMullen at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)

June 1, 2007

Google's street level maps: coolness to the n^th power.

Google's "street level" view of Marine Drive in San Francisco, CA. Click for a larger view

I had planned to include Google's newest edition to it's "Maps" service in my next edition of "cool web tools", but decided that Street Level Maps is so cool that it deserves it's very own entry.

So have you seen the street level views yet? They're not available for all cities (yet), but do include San Francisco, Denver, Las Vegas, New York, and Miami. There's a nice description on the CNET website.

The small image at the top of this entry shows the Golden Gate bridge from the vantage point of Marine Drive in San Francisco. Click the image to enlarge -- make sure you note the controls in the upper-left quandrant that allow you to zoom and rotate the image. Then go out and see for yourself the potential of one of Google's latest innovations.

Posted by AnthonyMcMullen at 12:06 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack