SiteLines - Ideas About Web Searching

Recommended Resource: Library Research Service - A Portal for Library-Related Statistics and Research

The Library Research Service provides library professionals, educators, public officials, and the media with research and statistics about libraries. The service is a unit of the Colorado State Library and the Colorado Department of Education and operates in partnership with the Library and Information Science (LIS) Program, College of Education, University of Denver.

From the site: "LRS.org provides online access to research and statistics about academic, public, and school libraries in Colorado and beyond. For each type of library, it provides statistics for Colorado, other states, and the nation. The website also provides access to two types of reports: FAST FACTS, one- to three-page issue papers on current topics and trends facing libraries that are published once or twice a month; and A CLOSER LOOK reports, more in-depth analyses resulting from major LRS research projects that are published two or three times a year. In addition, the site provides links to research and statistics on specific library topics—such as materials prices, public opinion about libraries, and library technology—and links to dynamic tools that assist users in making sense of library statistics—such as peer comparison tools and calculators that adjust dollar figures for inflation over time or cost-of-living differences from place to place. Contact information for other organizations involved in library research and statistics and key individuals in those organizations is also provided."

Google - Loyalty or Laziness

Chris Sullivan comments in this week's Search Engine Watch on a recent study conducted on behalf of search engine marketing firm iProspect about apparent loyalty to search engines. According to iProspect's press release, "56.7 percent of Internet users use the same search engine or directory when they are looking for information, and another 30.5 percent of Web users have a few specific search engines they use regularly. A small amount of Web users, 12.8 percent, said they use a different search engine each time, depending on what they are looking for at that moment.

To iProspect, the study proves loyalty to search engines. Although the research methods aren't explicitly stated, the sample size of almost 1700 respondents is significant. And results come as no surprise to any teacher of web search skills, who already knows that users use what they know and can remember (and it's usually a popular commercial search engine).

I'm somewhat more inclined to side with writer John Battelle, who says, "I'm not sure I buy the whole search engine loyalty thing. I think folks aren't loyal, they're lazy." But surely in addition to the ease and simplicity of anywhere/anytime searching, I think that many searchers are simply unaware of alternative quality resources.

Evidence suggests that even serious academic researchers seem to go for Google over databases in a big way. In "Is Google the Competition" which appears in the April 1 2004 issue of LibraryJournal, Carol Tenopir describes an (unreferenced) Elsevier study, in which Elsevier asked librarians and scientists to name the top three most reliable online services. "Librarians named ScienceDirect, ISI's Web of Science, and Medline. Scientists, on the other hand, named Google, Yahoo!, and PubMed."

As search engines continue to devolve into big-box shopping and entertainment channels, it will be interesting to see if brand "loyalty" to these tools continues. Watch your favorite science prof for details.

Staying Up To Date in the Ever Changing Web Search World

A PDF copy of my article "Staying Up To Date in the Ever-Changing Web Search World (Information Outlook vol. 8 no. 3 March 2004, pp.30-34) is now reproduced (with permission) at http://www.workingfaster.com/uptodate_infooutlook2004.pdf

The Effect of File-Sharing on Record Sales: an Empirical Analysis

This March 2004 study by Felix Oberholzer of the Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf of the University of North Carolina adds some thoughtful analysis to the often heated debate on the effect of music downloads on recording sales. The paper is presented in draft form for comments: I presume it will be published at some point in the future.

The authors compared a large and statistically relevant dataset of filesharing downloads to sales of the same items during the same period, and found that "downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero." Great charts and helpful bibliography add to the study's value.

Of course, the music industry has responded to the study, and it is not pleased. The industry blasted the paper, suggesting it was incomplete and flawed. (Apparently the authors reviewed the industry-sponsored studies, and said they were horrible.) The April 14 2004 News Observer has more on the blowup.

Google's Ranking and the Jewwatch.com Controversy

The New York Times of April 13 carried a story on the high ranking of the anti-semitic site Jewwatch.com in Google's search results of the keyword jew.

Google was asked to remove the offensive "content" but declined, asserting that it would be inappropriate to attempt to manually regulate its algorithmic rank ordering except in cases where inclusion of the link would be illegal. However, on a search of the word jew in Google, searchers will see the unusual positioning of an official Google statement in the space typically reserved for sponsored links.

Although Google may be caught in a no-win PR flap, the real story may be the stunning and continued reliance on a one-box search engine for all the world's information. Writer John Battelle, co-founder of Wired Magazine, founder of the Standard, and currently a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, suggested in his weblog that the real issue "is the fact that Google is taken as the first and last word on what our culture believes to be important w/r/t any given term."

A Voice-Over-IP Primer

There is a buzz in the telcomm industry, and plenty of new business and consumer offerings of telephones that use broadband Internet connections rather than a telephone line to create voice connections. It's hard to imagine or visualize how your phone service might be different if you signed up for VOIP from your local telephone company. To the rescue comes the FCC, which has put together a great little illustrated FAQ on VOIP for beginners: http://www.fcc.gov/voip/ The page also has links to statements made by US legislators and several FCC news releases.

Everything's Coming Up Yahoo!

Over the last couple of weeks, another significant result of consolidation was finalized as Alltheweb.com, Altavista.com and Lycos.com changed their default search engine to Yahoo's.

I conducted a couple of brief test searches to see how closely the results matched. The results are not precisely comparable because preferences within each search brand vary slightly and don't enable identical search conditions. Nevertheless, on examination of the first 20 search results in each tool (and ignoring the ads/sponsorship links), search results were similar though not precisely the same. (I am still wondering about why Yahoo's numbers were so much higher than the other brands, so if someone has an answer, please send me an email.) Of all the examples, only Lycos's results contain items not seen in the other search tools, and this might be explained by the presence of keyword-matched Looksmart results, which appear in Lycos but not in Altavista, Alltheweb, or Yahoo.

Regardless of the relatively minor differences in displayed results, there is no question that the index serving up the results is now clearly marked on all the properties as Yahoo's. As a result, there currently appears to be no compelling reason to regard any of these alternatively-branded engines as anything else but Yahoo clones, renamed.

You can see my test searches below: (all have content filter options turned OFF; language set to no preference, whenever possible)

mandatory retirement on Yahoo!
mandatory retirement on Alltheweb.com
mandatory retirement on Altavista.com
mandatory retirement on Lycos.com

Google FAQ

There is an excellent set of frequently-asked questions about Google at http://www.geocities.com/googlepubsupgenfaq/. The FAQ contains extracts of popular questions asked and answered at the newsgroup google.public.support.general. In addition to typical "How do I ..." search-related questions, there are answers to questions about Google backlinks, an explanation of "Supplemental Result" and "Cache"; and how Google redirects users to specialty sites (like Google.ca for Canadians) using geotargeting. (Spotted on Researchbuzz.com).

Student Papers and Web Citations

Some uplifting research on the relatively low reliance on web site citations by undergraduates: In "Citation patterns of advanced undergraduate students in biology" (Science and Technology Libraries 22, no. 3-4: 161-179; subscription required), the authors evaluate the citation selections of 33 undergraduate biology papers. Of a total of 770 citations (about 23 per paper), only 1% came from web sites. The vast majority of citations came from -- you guessed it -- journal articles or book chapters. This may be comforting news to many information professionals who often feel that users rely too heavily on free web sources.

Bibliography of Legal Literature on Same Sex Marriage

Paul Axel-Lute of Rutgers University Law Library has compiled an outstanding bibliography of legal resources on same-sex marriage. In addition to web based resources and book citations, Axel-Lute includes lists of articles that debate both sides of the issue; links to key state legislation or rulings; and legal information from several other countries that have recent rulings on same-sex unions. (Spotted on Resourceshelf.com)