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Category: Tools and Technology

Of Brand Loyalty and Brainwashing

Published by Iris on Sunday, October 1st, 2006

The Librarian in Black wrote a very compelling piece about Ask.com a couple of weeks ago (see, I am working through all the exciting stuff I’ve been meaning to read for weeks and weeks). The comments got to be a little battle-of-the-search-engines-ish, but the original post really got me thinking about my search engine use at home, at the library, and especially at the reference desk..

I’ve played around with Ask.com quite a bit, and for the most part I love it… lots. There are a couple of things I don’t like: the ads, for instance, and the knock-you-out-of-your-shoes red color. (Google has ads, but maybe my eyes have learned to jump down precisely to the first “real” result, and I’d be the first to admit that choosing a search engine based on accent color is less than ideal.) But for the most part I absolutely love Ask. Why? Because of the thought that goes into leading users from a broad search right down to what they actually were looking for via right-hand-margin menus for narrowing and expanding searches, and those nifty drop-down boxes for help clarifying ambiguous searches. Their driving/walking directions are also wonderful, mostly because it’s so easy to add a new point and re-order the points in a trip. But I digress. The point is that I hardly ever use this thing that I like so much, and I don’t think it has anything to do with brand loyalty.

I think it has something to do with being brainwashed by Google, and with using so many of my other Google products all the time. And as we all know, Google generally does a very good job. Not only that, but I feel like I “know” it better because so much has been surmised about its ranking algorithms, particularly PageRank. These things were taught to me in library school. Ask.com’s ranking behavior wasn’t mentioned in library school. Somehow knowing everything I do about all that I don’t know about Google’s ranking rules is somehow more comforting than not knowing what I don’t know about Ask’s ranking (called “ExpertRank” I just found out). I don’t think this is Ask’s fault. I haven’t done a whole lot of sleuthing, and the service is relatively new, but it’s also not as easy to come by information on ExpertRank as it is on PageRank.

And like one of the commenters said in response to the Librarian in Black’s post, Googling is such a convenient word, while “ask-dot-comming” will take a bit of getting used to.

Still, I’m resolved to make more informed and less habit-driven choices when I do my searching. Wish me luck. Battling brainwashing is kind of an up-hill process.

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To Furl or Not To Furl, That is the Question

Published by Iris on Saturday, September 23rd, 2006

When he wrote those worde, Shakespeare little knew the abuse his words would receive for generations to come. This is the second time this week I’ve abused them. The first was in the title of a library session for a Shakespeare class — “To Libe or Not To Libe, That is the Question: Skills and Strategies to Help You Libe.” (By the way, the students have a habit of shortening names at Carleton, so the library is the “Libe,” the arboretum is the “Arb,” etc.)

Anyway, I’ve come upon a dilemma. I don’t know whether to continue to use my Furl or whether to switch to Del.icio.us. Ironically, I haven’t been adding much to my furl lately for three reasons: the form that lets you describe and categorize pages is cumbersome, it often takes quite a long time to save pages, and there are days when I can’t access my archive. Combine these complaints with Del.icio.us’ easy entry form, complete with suggested tags and quick saving, and you see why I decided earlier this week that I’d start transferring everything in my furl over to del.icio.us.

No sooner had I made the decision, though, than two problems presented themselves. First, I was unable to make the export/import mechanism work, so I’d have to manually transfer my furl entries. “Oh, well,” I thought, “at least I’ve only saved 108 things in furl so far. How bad can it be?” It seemed like just the sort of job to do during an upcoming Sunday reference shift. But then came the second problem. I learned this morning that I can’t exceed 255 characters when describing the page in del.icio.us’ notes field. This is a problem because I often include information on the licensing or rights statements in my descriptions of digitized collections (example here). I’d hate to lose that information.

So, persuade me. Which tool is better? Why? Do any of you use both? If so, how do you decide what goes where?

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Project Gutenberg Update

Published by Iris on Monday, September 18th, 2006

I don’t know when this happened, but Project Gutenberg (my favorite source for free, full-text-searchable, downloadable e-texts of out-of-copyright books – that’s quite a mouthful) has made its site into a wiki. You have to log in to edit pages, and there are some restrictions on which pages you can edit (here are the rules), but it looks like anyone can create an account. Cool.

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