SiteLines - Ideas About Web Searching

What's New when the Internet Goes to College 2004-05

Steve Jones of the University of Illinois, and a research associate with the Pew Internet and American Life Project, produced a Powerpoint update of the 2002 Pew Internet report "The Internet Goes to College" with new data updated from 2004 and 2005. Some of the more interesting findings related to information-seeking by college students include:

Faculty don't see the Internet as improving the quality of student work -- rather, they see the quality of student work worsened or at best unaffected by the web (slide 19); and 44% of faculty feel that plagiarism has increased as the result of Internet access (slide 20).

Many of the comments that Jones supplies demonstrate the gulf between faculty and student views. While faculty are startled at the inability of students to discern the difference between quality and junk online, students seem to use whatever it takes to either make the prof happy or get the job done in the minimum time:

“I use Google because I heard it searches for more things” (than other sources)"
“I believe I can find anything on the Internet. There hasn’t been anything I haven’t been able to find.”
“Because I’m lazy.”
"Books have “so much information that no one can go through it all.”
"I use “the Internet first is because it is more convenient.”
"I go to the library “because that’s what teachers like.”
“Google has gotten me through college.”

MSN Search Adds (Some) Useful Advanced Search Features

Gary Price reports in a recent issue of Resourceshelf.com that MSN Search has added some new advanced search features.

MSN Search joins the majority of other search engines that now offer the FILETYPE feature (filetype:pdf). But a few others are not only novel, but potentially useful, specifically CONTAINS (contains:) returns documents that contains words; LinkDomain (linkdomain:) returns sites that link to ANY page in the specified domain; InAnchor (inanchor:) returns results that have the keywords in the anchor text (that's the text that is surrounded by the A HREF tag)

No doubt the other search engines will rush to catch up. I still don't much care for MSN Search as an alternative to my other favorites - but some of these features may encourage advanced searchers to try MSN in cases when other search engines can't be exploited sufficiently.

Best 46 Free Utilities

I don't know about you, but I'm tired of seeing the same old (and mainly not very good) software appear on the major mags' "best of" lists. So it was refreshing to spot Ian Richards at Tech Support Alert's The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities, which I spotted on my colleague Gwen Harris' weblog, Internet News this week. I loved almost everything about this roundup, but the best part was learning about not-so-well-known software and resources. Recommended.

Doctors are Blogging on Medical Searching

Thanks to my colleague Dean Giustini at University of British Columbia's Health Sciences Library for cluing me into the (relatively) new world of doctor blogging. A quick glance at two blogs, KevinMD and California Medicine Man reveals that doctors are sharing all kinds of information and ideas in their blogs, including thoughts on searching for quality medical information.

Librarians can learn a lot from reading these blogs. If you're one, expect an initial shocked-and-appalled reaction when you realize just how heavily docs rely on tools like Google and Google Scholar for searching for quality medical information.

In a recent entry, John Ford (aka California Medicine Man), who is an assistant prof at UCLA School of Medicine, recounted how he tweaks Google to get better results by running his search in Google and adding the keyword differential to get better results. KevinMD, aka Kevin Pho, an internal medicine physician at the Nashua Medical Group in Boston, recounts numerous keyword tips and tricks to squeeze better information out of Google (e.g. adding keywords like AAFP or ICD9 to tweak results.

It appears that many actually prefer Google to PubMed, mainly because it's fast and its relevance algorithm is deemed preferable to PubMed's last-in-first-out approach. Of course, most docs aren't also information professionals, so they won't know (unless we tell them) that Google's relevance algorithms prefer the most popular, and that its coverage of PubMed content can be significantly out of date. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with using Google or its subsets to find what I call a something (which roughly translates into something that looks like "good enough" for the task at hand), it absolutely cannot be relied on for practice excellence.

I posted a comment on Ford's weblog today - you can read it at: http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=10965136&postID=111881456515423089&isPopup=true

Premium Consumer Content is Back -- Brought to You By The Search Engines

Although several premium-content providers have tried and failed over the years (think about Northern Light), the second wave of consumer-level paid content seems to have arrived. What's more, this one may be a winner, if only because the companies already are already heavily trafficked destination sites for free content. Google Scholar and Google Print kicked it off late last year with behind-the-password indexes to full text content from journal and book publishers. Now Yahoo! has entered the fray in its own unique way -- this time with Yahoo! Subscriptions. It's simple, consumer-friendly (enables searching of Consumer Reports, Wall Street Journal and other popular publications) to differentiate it (at least for now) from Google's more scholastic ambitions. For the publishers, what could be better than a guarantee that popular search engines will point directly to their paid content, rather than requiring it to compete with all the other content in the free index?

Search engines are "surprisingly ineffective" for many queries: New York Times

Eureka! Journalist James Fallows, in today's New York Times, finally gets it -- that search engines are great at answering easy, quick-fact types of questions, but are pretty terrible for more indepth critical questions. In his article "Enough Keyword Searches. Just Answer My Question," (free registration required to view), he reminds readers that for complex, indepth questions, searchers try in vain to outguess the engines. Fallows describes his frustration trying to use keyword searches to find consistent state-by-state data covering the last 40 years -- and coming up completely empty after fruitless hours of searching. "We live with these imperfections by trying to outguess the engines - what if I put "per capita spending by states" in quotation marks? - and by realizing that they're right for some jobs and wrong for others."

Advice to Physicians on Google Scholar

Jim Henderson, director of the McGill University Medical Library, contributes to the assessment log on Google Scholar in the latest issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Henderson weighs in with a brief but pointed assessment of the relative value of Google Scholar for practising physicians. Using simple but effective examples Henderson shows that the ability of GS to provide fast, easy access to important recent medical information is highly variable, and he concludes that "it is not a useful choice for physicians."

Researching Medical Literature on the Internet - 2005 Update

In the latest issue of LLRX.com, Gloria Miccioli has produced an update on resources for finding health and medical literature on the web. In addition to PubMed and the NLM Gateway to Medline and other health databases, she also covers a range of commercial and non-commercial portal sites. For those unfamiliar with PubMed or the NLM Gateway, her consise summary is a great place to start.