Sunday, July 27, 2008

Googled (2.0)

No books or bookstores,
just Google.

No libraries or librarians,
just Google.

No articles to clip and file,
just Google.

No academic search engines,
just Google.

No conversations,
just Google.

It ranks, rates,
never hesitates:
Google.

It tells what is real,
tells us how to feel:
Google.

I googled Google,
and got Google.

I googled myself
and found myself
Googled.

12 comments:

pgepps said...

I'm not sure academics are quite down to reading only Google, these days, or likely to be so--our students may feel they are, but they are easily enough shown up.... :-)

I'm pretty pro-Google, as the alternative to one big, open collection of everything is lots of silos of information, sealed off except to institutions with big pocketbooks; but there have to be gatekeepers and quality control in certain things, and will be so for as far as I can see....

John van der Veen said...

It's the anti-christ.

Dave114 said...

No academic search engines,
just Google.


Google Scholar?

Unknown said...

For Google so loveth the world
that it gave its search results,
that whosoever clicketh on them
should not 404,
but have everlasting distraction.

nancy said...

google is so passe....

it's now cuil

interesting... searching cuil for "doug groothuis" elicits a most excellent reading list :)

pgepps said...

cuil has serious, serious defects. Google's results are still better.

Using Google + Yahoo! gives a pretty good scatter of results. Nothing I've tried with cuil improves on it.

There is, of course, Dogpile, if you're really into that sort of search....

nancy said...

cuil v. google... depends on what you are searching for

"doug groothuis" on google returns a flat listing of stuff. on cuil I immediately have a sense of who he is and what he is about. cuil organizes the "knowledge" it returns in a very useful, advertisement-free (for the immediate future) environment.

googling "labview local variable property node" returns important links at the beginning of the flat list. cuil returns nothing useful and is clearly not addressing the space of my profession.

regardless - good to see an innovative newcomer to the market! I will search cuil regularly to gain a better sense of the market they plan to target.

getting back to the meat of Doug's post, when cuilling him (or cuiling him) one gains a small sense of the person and not just a smattering of stuff. when googling tech stuff, I don't mind the smattering...

Douglas Groothuis, Ph.D. said...

Nancy:

What the heck is cuil?

DG

nancy said...

go to www.cuil.com and type in your name.

it's a new search engine that was launched recently. a few ex-google types and some others are behind it.

pgepps said...

I know it's all Web 2.0 and such, but I don't find that scattering the results in boxes across columns helps. It's nice and non-hierarchical, but it conveys LESS information about the nature and success of my search.

david said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
david said...

Related to this, has anyone heard of the latest Google project called knoll? Guess they want to compete with Wikipedia apparently (oh joy).