Posts Tagged ‘Google’

The Not-so-Perpetual Beta

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

One of the tenets of Web 2.0, according to Tim O’Reilly’s seminal article, is “the perpetual beta.” That is, “the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.”

Well, Web 2.0-ish applications seem to be shedding beta-ness fast and furious lately: first Gmail, now Remember The Milk.

I know, I know: two datapoints does not a trend make. Also, I’m not really sure you could reasonably call Gmail a Web 2.0-ish application… I mean, email is about as Web 1.0 as it gets. But it’s Google… so gets some 2.0-ish cred somehow.

Also, just because Gmail and RTM have dropped the “beta” label, doesn’t mean they’ve stopped rolling out functionality rapidly. Or that they’re developed any less in the open.

But I just wonder what it means for the whole concept of 2.0-ishness that two of the best established web-native applications have abandoned the beta label. I suspect they won’t be the last, either. Does this mean that the label “beta” isn’t as cool anymore as it was once upon a time? (”Once upon a time” being a phrase which here means, two short years ago.) That calling something beta won’t give you cred any more? Or is this just the natural progression of the End of the Software Release Cycle that O’Reilly predicted? That calling something “beta” isn’t even necessary any more; it’s just assumed?

Nitpicking the Google Book Search agreement

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Today’s big news: Google and the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers have come to an agreement on the lawsuit that was brought against Google in 2005 about the Google Book Search project.

As usual, Jessamyn West has collected and posted an excellent set of links about this.

Two sentences in particular from the Google blog post about this caught my attention:

The agreement gives public and university libraries across the U.S. free, full-text viewing of books at a designated computer in each of their facilities. That means local libraries across the U.S. will be able to offer their patrons access to the incredible collections of our library partners — a huge benefit to the public.

Yes, that means local libraries will be able to offer their patrons access, but will they? I want someone to follow this up in a year or so, to see where in the library those designated computers are. Are they clearly marked as being the “Google Books computer”? Are they centrally located or in some out-of-the way corner of the computer cluster? Are they in the computer cluster at all, or on a staff member’s desk?

Maybe I’m just being overly cynical. But anything that requires libraries to expend extra effort in maintaining their computers, in my experience, has the potential to go awry.

Have you seen this car?

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

I’m fascinated by Google Street View. Like so many Google toys, it’s both exceptionally addictive as a time-sink and slightly creepy. Because what one does with Google and all Google toys is ego surf, I of course drove virtually down my street. I was gratified to discover that (a) neither I nor any of my neighbors was captured on camera, and (b) that you can’t see my house or car from the street, on account of the many trees in my front yard.

After ego surfing, I started geeking out… next I wondered what platform Google used to take these images. And lo and behold, if you swivel the camera down you can see the car they drove around, or most of it anyway. There’s a rather large blind spot, presumably the camera mount. The car looks like your basic Camry-or-equivalent, with a weird mount on the roof that looks like it’s made of tie-downs and PVC pipe.

Click for full-size images:

Google Street View car in Chapel Hill

Google Street View car in Chapel Hill

UBC is not ignoring Google Scholar

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

Five (5) Reasons Why Academic Librarians Can’t Ignore Google Scholar, from the UBC Academic Search – Google Scholar Blog

For my money, reason #2 is the killer: GS will now contain on the order of 800 million to 1 billion citations, thus making it probably one of the largest scholarly citation databases on the planet. Ignoring that is like ignoring the elephant in the room.

And, I would just like to add, interesting that UBC has a blog devoted to GS.

Google saving university presses?

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

Some Publishers Warm to Google Book Search, from the Chronicle

This has been so effective, says a representative of Oxford University Press, that “321,000 times in the last two years, people have clicked on an Oxford book saying ‘I want to buy this.’ We spent nothing to do that. That’s why we’re a big fan of this program.”

This is an interesting (one presumes) unintended consequence of Google Book Search, that by directing traffic to university presses, it’s actually increasing the sales of scholarly monographs. Frankly, anything that can increase the sales of scholarly monographs is going to be a good thing for university presses, most of which are on major life support these days.

Authors@Google

Friday, May 4th, 2007

Maybe I’m hopelessly behind the times, but I just stumbled across this: Authors@Google.

The Authors@Google program brings authors of all stripes to Google for informal talks centering on their recently published books.

Interestingly, the full set of videos is on YouTube and not Google Video. Though I suppose now that Google owns YouTube, it’s six of one half dozen of the other. Makes me wonder why Google Video still exists, actually; why Google is maintaining two video sites.

G12

Tuesday, February 6th, 2007

Press release from Princeton: Library joins Google project to make books available online

A new partnership between the Princeton University Library and Google soon will make approximately 1 million books in Princeton’s collection available online in a searchable format.

Princeton will be joining 11 other libraries.

Copyright issues notwithstanding, I’m particularly glad to see the Google Books project expanding, in light of this: Archivists Lose Another Round in Bid to Ease Copyright Restrictions on Old Books and Films, from the Chronicle

More thoughts on the death of Google Answers

Friday, December 1st, 2006

This article in the NY Times repeats a lot of the same coverage, and even much of the same text I’ve seen elsewhere, but it does have one additional bit:

“It has been one of our most successful launches,” said Tomi Poutanen, product director for Yahoo Social Search. … Mr. Poutanen described it as a way to harness the “wisdom of the crowds.”

First of all, it’s the wisdom of crowds, not wisdom of the crowds. But whatever. If this is the wisdom of crowds, I want nothing to do with it. Have you seen the answers provided in Yahoo! Answers? They’re almost uniformly bad. Maybe I’ve only been finding the bad ones… but really, what are the odds of that? This post has a very nice comparison of the 4 questions mentioned in Google Answers “adieu post.” (Nice work, AU interactive, whoever you are.) Some of the Best of Answers are not bad, but almost none provide any links to resources to justify up the answer provided. And the Other Answers are uniformly useless.

Which makes this all the more depressing:

Figure courtesy of SearchEngineWatch

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: As Nicholas Carr so eloquently put it: free trumps quality all the time.

I’ve been reading blog posts that interpret this post on the Yahoo! search blog as a case of extreme schadenfreude.

The folks who are researchers and information specialists have been at this longer than us, and there’s a lot we can learn from you. We’ve set up a Yahoo! Group for former Google Answers Researchers and we’d prefer that one of the exGARs help moderate the group.

Finally, we’re also going to be meeting up with some of the most prolific Yahoo! Answers users here at the Sunnyvale campus on Wednesday, December 13. And we’d like Google Answers researchers to join us, tell us what you think and get to know what we’re doing here.

But I prefer to interpret this differently. I would like to believe that the Yahoo! people know that the answers provided in Yahoo! Answers are quite poor, and would like to recruit some answerers who will actually provide some good responses. Not that GA’s responses are great shakes, but some of them are quite good.

Which brings me to my ultimate question: What incentive(s) are there for answerers to provide good quality answers? GA of course had one answer: money. Knowledge iN has quite another: a reputation economy. Library reference has yet another: years of training and professional pride. What incentive(s) can there be in online QA services that (a) are free, (b) do not accrue reputation to answerers, and (c) require no training or credentials?

Google Answers closing its doors

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

Google Answers logo

Adieu to Google Answers, from the Google Blog

Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers…

Though it does not say why. I first learned about this from a student who is a Google Answerer, who forwarded an email announcement from Google that he received to me. In it was this:

We considered many factors in reaching this difficult decision, and ultimately decided that the Answers community’s limited size and other product considerations made it more effective for us to focus our efforts on other ways to help our users find information.

The blog post goes on to say:

For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product…

Though clearly not very scalable, if the community was limited in size. And fundamentally this is, I suspect, one of the reasons Google Answers was axed: human-intermediated question-answering is not very scalable. Librarians have known that for years. Humans are expensive and human-intermediated question-answering is time-consuming. Search engine algorithms are perhaps not cheaper, but certainly faster. And I suspect that search engine algorithms are cheaper, or at least it’s easier to justify the cost: it’s always easier to spend money upfront than on an ongoing basis. As Nicholas Carr so eloquently put it: free trumps quality all the time.

When Google Answers was launched there was a lot of Sturm und Drang about Google competing with library reference. In the intervening years, Google has in fact gone places that libraries should have gone first — or so I seem to always be ranting to my students, much to their boredom, I suspect. (But then, libraries don’t have several billion dollars to throw at interesting projects.) How I interpret the discontinuation of Google Answers is thus: library-style reference (that is, human-intermediated question-answering) is both financially and managerially untenable, outside of an institutional umbrella that can (read: is willing to) support it as a loss leader. Which is to say, outside of a library; which is to say, outside of the funding stream of the town or city or university that supports the library. I therefore lump the discontinuation of Google Answers in with the possible imminent discontinuation of the VRD, and the IPL’s constant ongoing struggle for funding.

Yet another article on Google Book Search

Sunday, August 13th, 2006

Search Me?, from the WaPo

But it’s a good & thoughtful article & worth reading, even though it’s one of about a brazillion now on the subject. But for my money, this is the most interesting part:

After the university digitized its card catalogue… use of the collection jumped 50 percent — simply because books were easier to find.

The university here is Stanford. It’s refreshing to see some actual data on this. Of course it makes sense that electronic access increases use, and we know it’s true in other contexts, but there’s just so little data out there to support that assertion in library contexts. And one could debate the causality of the increase in use being caused by ease of findability, but at least there’s a correlation.