Librarians To Attempt To Outsmart Google

Ars Technica:

The Reference Extract project hopes to turn all of this credibility research into something practical. The team consists of professors like Lankes and the OCLC, an academic technology organization that counts more than 60,000 (!) libraries among its members. The initial work is funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Their first goal is certainly ambitious: use the web sites that librarians suggest most often as the basis of a more credible search engine that can return reliable results.

Reference Extract already believes that it can best Google, even before work has begun in earnest. That's because it has already used librarian-recommended sites to populate a custom Google search engine. Simply doing this produced search results that testers ranked as "more credible" than searches run on the main Google index, even when the testers had no idea that one of the searches was based only on librarian-approved sites.

Lankes wants to expand on the experiment, building a new search engine architecture and expanding the data pool. To get that data, OCLC is providing access to its QuestionPoint application, which logs librarian answers to patron questions from around the world. Mining the QuestionPoint database for web links provides a collection of librarian-approved links, and the links are generated simply in the course of doing business. Reference Extract will then weight the results based on criteria like how often a site appears and whether sites are recommended continuously or only at certain times.

Read the whole story: Ars Technica

Comments

[elloyd74]

(Cue Timberlake)
I'm bringin' reference back
I got sweet resources that Google lacks
Girl, let me take u deeper in the stacks
Or text your message and I'll text u back
(Take it to the bridge!) etc

http://shelfcheck.blogspot.com/2008/11/shelf-check-293.html

[ArturoYee]

So now the librarians judge the quality of a source is -

[KillTheMessenger]

...quite simple, actually. Libraries sort books into fiction and non-fiction. The fiction section contains everything that is made up. The non-fiction section contains only information that is backed by references to other information (see the quality disclaimer on e.g. Wikipedia if there are no high quality references in an article). In university libraries the non-fiction section is mostly stacked with books of interest for people who actually understand the subject matter (they order them!). So as a librarian you have a staff of specialists (your clients) telling you what's good and what isn't. And it's not like a librarian can't judge the quality of a book themselves. Many are highly educated people who have seen plenty of great works and even more trash. They can tell fairly well.

There is the occasional hit and miss, but in comparison to what you get from a search engine the quality is much higher.

[ArturoYee]

Yes - for certain types of information, it will be very useful. Such as looking up information on neutron activation analysis or shell and tube exchangers.

But quality of political commentary? Not sure if I really want that "filtered". I guess we can put that into a category so it is not filtered.

[Tom95134]

Good luck.

[KillTheMessenger]

Now that is an interesting idea. Quality instead of quantity. Of course, we have to ask ourselves, what took librarians ten years to realize that? I do note that being a librarian is kind of a "slow" profession, but still... it's not like we couldn't have collected high quality links a long time ago...