Many of Google’s projects are languishing on the shelf. I wonder whether this project – called Google 411 – has legs?
Might it have any application for wireless hospital environments when the information need is clinical? Could we use this in medical libraries? Any thoughts? – Dean
Hi Jason,
How are things at Mahalo? My name is Dean Giustini at the UBC google scholar blog.
I have some questions I’d like to ask you about Mahalo:
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1. Are you aware of these three librarian-moderated directories?
http://www.intutue.ac.uk
http://ipl.org
http://www.lii.org
How does Mahalo compare to them, do you think?
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2. Do you hire librarians? How are your ‘guides’ trained to evaluate information?
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3. Health librarians might be interested in Mahalo. Are you aware of Google’s Google health project? What do you think of it? Is Mahalo useful for health?
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4. Finally, do you consider Mahalo a vertical search engine (here’s a health vortal)?
David Rothman did a nice post-mortem on the BMJ piece on web 3.0 yesterday, generating a number of comments here and at his own blog. I received quite a few private e-mails as well.
I think the discussion has been amicable, but I wouldn’t call his post fisking. One glaring inaccuracy needs correction. He says, quoting me:
Giustini: “Despite its constant accessibility, Google’s search results are emblematic of an approaching crisis with information overload, and this is duplicated by Yahoo and other search engines.”
Rothman: “Huh? How are Google search results emblematic of information overload?”
Google most certainly is emblematic (a visible symbol) of information overload, and in fact is the information specialist’s laboratory for it. It’s well-documented throughout the blogosphere that web 2.0 has resulted in too many RSS feeds, too much data and information from disparate sources with little connection to each other.
Google is the epitome, the very gateway to all of this information. 100-200 million searches a day! So yes we do have information overload for most searchers in Google. 99% of the information that we are finding in Google is irrelevant to medicine.
Infoglut is the most shocking byproduct of web 2.0.
Mahalo tomorrow, I promise!
Over the Christmas holidays, my friend and colleague, Greg Rowell, put it best: “Doctors aren’t ready for web 3.0” – dude! Greg is the/a medical librarian at the Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster, B.C. and an adjunct faculty member at SLAIS.
Greg isn’t a blogger (a point in his favour), but he’s extremely good at distilling issues for me. My comment back to Greg was “…the BMJ editorial will get people talking. That’s my goal. Besides, what can you do in 1000 words or less? You can’t change the world.”
Today, there’s a nice thread about the Web 3.0 article over at David Rothman’s blog. David is a smart, savvy blogger. He makes some excellent points.
My only comment would be that the BMJ piece is not meant to be the definitive editorial on the changing web. If you have some different ideas on where the web is, why don’t you write your own piece? Move outside the blog, David. One thing about David’s blogging is that he doesn’t explore the social or cultural context for all the tools he introduces. It’s much harder to place information technologies in some context than it is to merely announce that you’ve found a new tool worth exploring.
Come back tomorrow for some discussion on Mahalo….
How many of you in academic/medical circles have been following the progress of the Mahalo search tool? (See wiki entry). Not many of you, if the blogosphere is any indication.
Mahalo is Jason Calacanis (see weblog)’ human-powered search engine, one that creates results based on human-sorted-out responses to the web’s most popular search terms. Who are these folks building the library catalogue’s version of the most popular web terms?
“Mahalo staffers, who are called “guides,” sit before two 24-inch monitors in a converted factory in Santa Monica, compiling search results one at a time. It can take several hours to do a single page of links, depending on the complexity of the topic. Most of Calacanis’s employees are young out-of-work novelists, screenwriters, musicians, artists, and actors–info addicts happy to earn $35,000 a year plus health benefits by searching the Web rather than shelving books at Barnes & Noble or slinging chai lattes at Starbucks. Calacanis has promised them 15% of the company when and if it goes public, with the investors getting a third and Calacanis keeping the rest.”
Tommorrow, I’ll deconstruct some of the Mahalo’s search results, and what the new search tool means for librarians. By the way, here’s Calacanis’ definition of web 3.0. I’ll deconstruct that, too.
“Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.”
I’ve tried pinging, and repinging. I’ve tried to embed the right ping code into Google scholar blog. Nothing works. I am not indexed in technorati, and this affects findability for my blog.
Is your blog indexed properly in technorati?
The most popular blogsearch tools, as many of you know, are Google blogsearch and Technorati.com. The problem seems to be that Technorati has had its challenges running its service in 2007, too much upheaval, an interface change (or two) and its founder, Dave Sifry, was ousted/forced out recently.
Perhaps my blogpost will get some attention from the nice folks at Technorati.
Note to Google Scholar: searchers are voting with their keyboards~!
Techcrunch.com (article) is reporting that Google scholar usage is down a hefty 32% in 2007. What are the reasons for this decline in use? Essentially it’s because Scholar is not as useful as promised, and many web searchers are now moving back to regular Google for indiscriminate scholarly trawling of the web.
As mentioned many times on this blog, and elsewhere, Google has squandered an opportunity to lead the abstracting and indexing field by providing a useful, free, open academic search tool. Instead, it chose to ignore the critiques of librarians. In 2006-7, it expected health librarians to volunteer to tag for Google health. In medicine, it neglected to consider a specific medical portal to consolidate searching for physicians. In fact, three years after its release, Google scholar is still in beta.
Unless it changes its course, Google scholar will go the way of the dodo bird eventually. Physicians and other health workers are advised to use regular Google for searching for the grey literature, but after consulting PubMed.gov and Scirus.com. (For a general meta-search try the TRIP database or SumSearch.)
1. Top Ten Web 2.0 Ideas & Issues
2. Google Health Ignores Librarians
4. Are you ready for the semantic web (aka Web 3.0)?
5. Top Ten Information Tech Tools
6. Top Ten Reasons To Enjoy Hospital Librarianship
7. Microsoft Buys 1.6% Stake in Facebook
8. Privacy and Facebook – Will Google Crawl our Thoughts Next?
9. The Human Search for What’s Important
10. Open Medicine launches in April 2007 & Its Benefit Evening
According to this respected German medical biblio-blog:
….this blog has moved ahead of Rothman and Krafty whose blogs have consistently been in the top 30 since the ranking’s inception. (Here’s the list directly). What’s going on here? Why has Rothman dropped precipitously to 55th place?
I find it strange (is it temporary?); the Canadian medical scene is much smaller than the U.S. scene (and so is the medical library scene; 10x smaller!). I assume that both Rothman and Krafty have loyal readers, and higher Pagerank and bloglines counts.
Many of the early assessments of 2007 suggest that our over-reliance on information technologies, the rise of multitasking (for example, driving while talking on your Blackberry) and web 2.0 have resulted in information overload. When info glut becomes severe, there is a concomitant drop in productivity (see this article).
It’ll be interesting to see what other medical librarians think of the assertions I made in the BMJ piece. My simple goal is to raise awareness of web issues, not to be the next Tim Berners-Lee or Nova Spivak. By the way, the BMJ piece could easily have been called How web 2.0 has caused information overload in 2007.
My point in the BMJ piece is that web 3.0 (or, whatever you want to call it) may be a solution to the problems we face on the current web, but that librarians need to be consulted not just the cutting-edge, semantic web folks.