Search Engines

Trying out Google Maps. It’s very cool! I tried finding my home address - found it just fine. Then I tried my library.

First, I typed in “kansas city public library.” It did fine - found all but one of our branches, and found our old location for the main library. It also lumped in North Kansas City Public Library, which is another library system (but it’s about 5 miles from us, too).

Google Maps also gave the old version of our URL (www.kcpl.lib.mo.us) to all the branch libraries, but our normal url (kclibrary.org) to our main branch. Hmm…

Now I’m going to play “where’s Waldo” - to try and find the missing branch (Waldo Community branch). If I do this search (”kansas city public library” waldo), I find the Waldo, North-east, and Ruiz branches… and also find Kansas City, Kansas Public Library (yet another close but separate library system across the state line - also a good 5 miles away).

So I sent a “Send Feedback” email giving them the correct address of our new Central Library… we’ll see what happens.

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Ok. I’m probably behind the times here, but I was thinking about how people evaluate website credibility (and more to the point, how I teach it in search engine classes). So I did a search to find some examples of best practices, and came across this amazing study done in 2002. It scared me.

Why did it scare me? I freaked because the number 1 thing people looked at (2,684 in this study) was… VISUAL DESIGN (46.1%)! Not the validity of the information presented on the page, not the accuracy of facts mentioned, but … design. “Nearly half of all consumers in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes” (link to quote page). One participant was even quoted as saying “just looks more credible” (about a website he/she was “evaluating”). My goodness.

You and I both know that the actual information presented on the page, whether that information comes in text, image, sound, etc., is the MOST important part of any website - a pretty website with no content isn’t terribly useful to our customers (well, unless your customer happens to be a web designer hunting for creative visual ideas…). And at the same time, given the same information on two different websites, it just makes sense to go with the better-designed site (easier/faster to download, easy-to-read format, etc.).

But the apparent fact that consumers are judging potential sources of useful information by how visually appealing it is or isn’t IS NOT GOOD! Sounds to me like it’s up to us library-types to continue teaching not only how to search the web, but maybe more importantly - how to evaluate the stuff found while searching the web.

And one other random thought - since our library websites are, in essence, being judged by the clothes they wear - is yours dressed appropriately? Does it have that “I’m useful” look? And what exactly does “I’m useful” look like? Any thoughts/ideas?

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CNN.com article - Brain teasers help Google recruit workers - Nov 4, 2004

Gee… here’s their lead-in to the article:

“Google Inc. locates almost anything on the Web within seconds, but finding the brainy engineers who program the company’s lightning-quick search engine takes more time — and a quirky bit of ingenuity.”

Anything on the web???? Sheesh. Why is it so hard to understand, especially in a techie news story (with probably reporters following techie trends)?

Alrightie - Here are some basic Google lessons for CNN:

1. Google doesn’t REALLY search the web - they search their own database of web history that they’ve gone out and fetched
2. Google is big, but still covers maybe 1/3 of the web

Class dismissed.

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Oops! Dang it, I hate when this happens… the problem, of course, was on my end.

When searching for an ERIC record, one needs to include the “ED” or “EJ” with the number…

That works great! I can now see my ERIC Document in all it’s out-of-date glory.

In my defense, when using the previous versions of ERIC, I was easily able to find my document without the ED added - when testing the new ERIC, I cut-and-pasted the ERIC # into all the databases… or maybe I used the ED too, and that was broken in the new database the first time around, but then I broke the search the second time around? Who knows.

I’m just glad everything is working now, and that I know how to use the dang thing.

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OK, this saga continues. The ERIC people have a 1-800 helpline (1-800-LET-ERIC) with extremely helpful customer service reps. I called them up to ask what the deal was with my ERIC Document, and she was able to pull it up immediately! Go figure - sort of like when the car’s having trouble until you take it to the shop!

Then she asked me if I had registered and was logged in… which I wasn’t - their website states “You do NOT need to login or register to use ERIC’s search feature” - so I hadn’t bothered with it.

She advised me to log in and try the search again, so I hung up and tried the search again…. and still got 0 results! So I called up ERIC again, and talked to another extremely nice customer service rep (wow! Two in a row!). We did the same thing again, and I still got nothing, and he found my ERIC Document.

Then he gave me another non-domain URL to try - http://8.2.64.62/ERICWebPortal/Home.portal - that’s the URL he uses at ERIC. But of course, we both got the same results - he found it, I didn’t.

So now I have an official help ticket logged with ERIC (AM7145001), and someone is supposed to contact me about it.

Let’s see what happens!

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I have published an ERIC Document (How to Teach Basic HTML in One Hour. 1999. ERIC Database. ED453836, Clearinghouse Identifier # IR058107). Not a terribly exciting article, but mine nonetheless. When the new version of ERIC was mentioned, I naturally decided to search for my document, to see how it appeared in the new version of ERIC. However, when I searched on the ED #, here’s what I found: “Your search found 0 results.” Yikes! Not a good thing.

So, I started poking around a bit. I did a search in a couple of other free ERIC sites, like www.eduref.org - and easily found my document. So, next I emailed the new ERIC people with my problem, and asked what the deal was - here’s their response: “In response to your question “why you can’t locate the record” we are aware of the issue and are currently working to resolve this issue. I hope this is helps”. OK… not exactly a fount of information, huh?

But that was on September 1. It’s now October 1, and all other ERIC databases seem to have reverted to the new version of ERIC, and I can’t find my document anymore! I haven’t tried subscription ERIC services, like OCLC’s Firstsearch version, but I think they’ll be the same - here’s what OCLC says about their ERIC database: “Several changes to the ERIC database on FirstSearch are scheduled to be implemented on October 1, 2004 … The ERIC database will now be produced by the Computer Sciences Corporation (http://www.csc.com). (quoted from “http://www.oclc.org/news/announcements/announcement118.htm”). CSC, I think, ifs the vendor who built and maintains the new version of ERIC.

So, where does that leave me? I just emailed the tech help guy from CSC (company doing the new ERIC database) again, asking if there’s been any movement on my “issue.” For kicks, I also emailed Gary at ResourceShelf, since he’s been posting alot about the new version of ERIC. And for now, I apparently don’t get to see my old, outdated article in it’s full, online, full-text glory.

But here’s the rub - I’m wondering WHY my ED Document doesn’t show up, which leads me to wonder one of two things:
1. if the new ERIC guys didn’t think my article was very useful, and so axed it from the database (not very likely), or 2. if there are other potentially more useful ED Documents that have also disappeared (much more likely).

And that’s scary, especially for education-based researchers. They are potentially missing some good info that they should be able to access via the new ERIC, but are missing it (and not being told why by the new ERIC people).

My goal is to get to the bottom of this! I’ll keep everyone posted. Not that anyone but me reads this, but… oh well.

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Yep - just confirmed it. In Google, using a “|” equals using OR.

Example:

Libraries | technology - finds 16,200,000 hits

Libraries OR technology - ALSO finds 16,200,000 hits

Just one of those “hmmm” discoveries.

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I just read about this on Research Buzz - Google is now indexing magazine articles and book exerpts! How cool is that?

Here’s how to search for them:

To find magazine articles, enter this:

libraries site:google.com inurl:articleid

To find book exerpts, enter this:

libraries site:google.com inurl:isbn

And to find both, do this:

libraries site:google.com inurl:isbn | inurl:articleid

My guess is the “|” must be similar to an OR search - never seen that one before. So, I’ll play around with it and try to figure it out a little.

Enjoy!

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Four things yahoo can do that google can’t
Very cool stuff. How do they figure this stuff out? Sheesh.

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