Search Engine Update by Gary Price—CLA Annual Conference

I had the privilege of introducing Gary Price for his Master Speaker session.  Gary is an amazing living-walking-breathing resource for the library profession and I was so excited that he could come to CLA to speak to California librarians (especially after Michael Gorman’s anti-technology talk).

The HTML version of his presentation is available online at: http://www.digbig/4feqe

Gary started by showing us the websites he edits that can help librarians keep up: ResourceShelf (http://www.resourceshelf.com/), DocuTicker (http://www.docuticker.com), and Search Engine Watch (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/).  He pointed out some other sites he really likes: Library Stuff (http://www.librarystuff.net/), The Shifted Librarian (http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/), Search Engine Showdown (http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/), etc.

Gary pointed out some of Topix’s research showing that the estimates of the number of blogs are highly inflated, and that once you remove splogs (spam blogs) and blogs not updated in the last two months, you’re only left with 5% or so of the estimates most of us see.

He reassured the audience that he doesn’t use each of these resources every day, but that our jobs as information professionals is to know what’s out there and know the right tool for the job. 

Gary talked about the key difference of resources “on the web” (free stuff) vs. resources visible “via the web” (proprietary databases like those we offer at libraries).  People also don’t understand the necessity to evaluate the quality of the information they find on the open web.  He lamented the fact that many teachers still tell students they can’t use anything on the web, not realizing that the libraries have much to offer in terms of e-resources that aren’t “the web.”  Amen brother!

He also mentioned that AOL is most likely going to be bought up in the near future, and his money is on MSN as the buyer.

Gary also talked about marketing—the fact that we don’t market our subscription databases well at all.  We need to promote these resources to the public by showing them why they need to use it, how they can improve their lives with these resources.  Amen again.  Personally, I’m just at a loss of how to do this.  But then again I’m not a marketer.  Perhaps there is a role for ALA, or more specifically LITA, in this.  Let’s hire some marketers to tell us as libraries how to mount national and local campaigns to market these resources to our users.  I think that oftentimes libraries are afraid to spend money on marketing, because they have limited funds and think it’s better to spend that money on actual resources.  But as Gary said, what good is this huge pile of great useful resources if no one knows about it?

He then moved into talking about search engines.  Users don’t use the advanced search features or look beyond the first page of results.  He emphasized that it’s important for us to remember that search engines make their money from ads, and that there are marketers working to get their clients’ pages to the top of results lists.  He discussed the importance of working with our patrons to understand results snippets (e.g. how to tell if the two words you searched on appear in totally different paragraphs in the top result).  He talked about advanced search features, and the importance of teaching patrons how to use things like limiting by site, file type, link, etc.

Google
He talked about some of Google’s more recent projects: Google Scholar (“scholarly” resources), Google Print (for publishers), Google Library (for library materials), and Google Alerts (which Gary pointed out only shows sites from the first 20 results). 

Yahoo
Gary pointed out that Yahoo does have a simple interface that most people don’t know about (http://search.yahoo.com), which is also customizable.  Yahoo is now caching pages like Google is, as well as linking to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.  He also pointed out Yahoo Finance, which is a wonderful one-stop shop for financial information, Yahoo News, Yahoo Image Search, Yahoo Local, and search subscriptions (access to for-pay articles through Factiva, Lexis Nexis, etc.).  He emphasized the importance of providing web information that’s accessible via mobile devices. 

AskJeeves and Teoma
Gary believes that Teoma will officially fold into AskJeeves soon.  AskJeeves has changed much in the last few years, and will be changing their name to Ask.com and removing the butler-image.  AskJeeves is also including direct links at the top of the pages, so a search for a city will bring back links at the top of the page to maps, the official city site, the chamber of commerce, etc.  They also provide suggested searches based on the user’s search terms.  He also tells us that their image database is quite impressive. 

MSN
Gary pointed to Virtual Earth, their search builder and its use of sliders, and to their use of direct links on their results pages, much like AskJeeves.  Finally, MSN is offering free access to the text content of Encarta (2 hour limit access per search run).

Exalead
It offers many advanced features, such as proximity searching, fuzzy searching, etc.  It also offers related terms to help narrow and focus your search, limiting by website location, and document type.  You can also add your favorite pages to the Exalead homepage.

Other Search Engines
Gigablast allows you to create your own topical search engine.  A9 offers those nifty major city block-view maps and Search Inside the Book.  He mentioned vertical search engines with specific topical foci, like GlobalSpec.com and ZoomInfo.  Finally, he touched on Clusty, a search engine that offers results clustered by sub-topic. 

Other Stuff
Gary discussed RSS as a new tool for finding and delivering information, and answer engines (AskJeeves, Answers.com) vs. search engines (Google, Yahoo).  He touched on dynamic query modification and dynamic search result modification with sliders and such.