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Tuesday, June 24, 2003
Google Meets eBay: What Academic Librarians Can Learn from Alternative Information Providers - Anne R. Kenney, et al.
Introduction: In April 2002, the dominant Internet search engine, Google™, introduced a beta version of its expert service, Google Answers, with little fanfare. Almost immediately the buzz within the information community focused on implications for reference librarians [1]. Google had already been lauded as the cheaper and faster alternative for finding information, and declining reference statistics and Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) use in academic libraries had been attributed in part to its popularity. One estimate suggests that the Google search engine handles more questions in a day and a half than all the libraries in the country provide in a year [2]. Indeed, Craig Silverstein, Google's Director of Technology, indicated that the raison d'être for the search engine was to "seem as smart as a reference librarian," even as he acknowledged that this goal was "hundreds of years away" [3]. Bill Arms had reached a similar conclusion regarding the more nuanced reference functions in a thought-provoking article in this journal on automating digital libraries [4]. But with the launch of Google Answers, the power of "brute force computing" and simple algorithms could be combined with human intelligence to represent a market-driven alternative to library reference services.
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