search engines WORK

Pretend you've never ever been in a large library. Pretend you know absolutely nothing about taxonomies. Pretend you don't know the difference between a magazine, a journal, an index and a book. Pretend you don't know what you don't know, and don't know how to articulate your unknowingness. Once you've pretended all this, make a pretend visit to a very large library for the first time.

And then tell me why it would be easier to find information in this situation than it would be to find information in a set of Google or Yahoo! search results?

from Alane in OCLC's It's all good: "Getting Thousands of Hits" - Ban This Meme

If I search on Google with some basic keywords, I get ten hits (on the first page).  With relevant ones at the top.

If I search on our OPAC (internal book inventory system), I get hits.  Sorted by some mysterious and inscrutable algorithm.

I want to find stuff about E.O. Wilson's research on ants.  Let's watch
Google - ants wilson

1. Of Ants and Earth

... That feat was a classic example of the way the world's 6,000 or so taxonomists proceed: shipping type specimens (one of Wilson's ants dated from 1826) from ... www.harvard-magazine.com/on-line/030390.html -  46k -  20 Mar 2005 -   Cached - Similar pages

2. Evolution: Library: EO Wilson: Ants and Ecosystems

... Known for his studies of leafcutter ants, Wilson characterizes the mutualistic symbiosis between ant and fungus as "one of the most successful experiments in ... www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/3/l_013_05.html -  26k -   Cached - Similar pages

3. Edward Osborne Wilson: Biography and Much More From Answers.com... his Ph.D. from Harvard. Wilson's specialty is ants, in particular their use of pheromones for communication. He is also famous for ...
www.answers.com/topic/edward-osborne-wilson -  28k -   Cached - Similar pages

And in the OPAC?

1		On the move to meaningful internet systems 2003 : CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE : OTM confederated international conferences CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE 2003, Catania, Sicily, Italy, November 3-7, 2003 : proceedings / Robert Meersman, Zahir Tari, Douglas C. Schmidt et al. (eds.).	c2003
2		Soft computing and industry : recent applications / Rajkumar Roy ... [et al.] (eds.).	2002
3		From animals to animats 6 : proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior / edited by Jean-Arcady Meyer ... [et al.]	c2000
4		Algorithmic number theory : third international symposium, ANTS-III, Portland, Oregon, USA, June 21-25, 1998 : proceedings / J.P. Buhler (ed.)

Yeah, that helped a lot.  Thanks Mr. OPAC!

Alane continues

Yes, people get thousands of hits when they search Google, and they do because it's easy. But, it is a convenient fiction librarians tell themselves that nothing of any use is found this way because of the abundance of information. It just isn't true. I say so in the introduction to The Environmental Scan: almost all of the 250+ references in the bibliography were found using Google, using keywords. So, let's get past this unhelpful "us vs them" mentality and work a lot harder at making the valuable information we curate easy to find.

In November 2004 I blogged about Google Scholar and wrote about a post from a blog called Dog News. I said: "This is how scholarly material is going to come to "the people" rather than the people coming to scholarly material which is the current paradigm at work in libraryland, and one that consistently fails to be attractive to searchers."