what's new?
I added a sort of embedded blog to my dad's website, so that he can have kind of updates/newslettery thing if he wants. I decided to go with Blogger, since it's in cohorts with Google now, hoping to make his site more "googleable". I'm very proud of myself for figuring all this out. I even pasted the "search this site" Google thing in.
Reading about Google is kind of interesting. I've been learning a tad about search engines lately, first of all in how things get listed for searchability. Then yesterday I perusing a recent Chronicle of Higher Ed. at the library, and there was an interesting article about "why some scholarly archives elude search engines." I, probably along with a majority of Americans who don't have library degrees, rely on Google as the first step to searching anything online. I guess I've always assumed that Google searches everything and that the more specific you are about search words, you will eventually find the kind of sites you are looking for. In fact, Google doesn't really search sites themselves, it actually searches other search engines, like Yahoo or AltaVista or Lycos or AOL. (Actually Yahoo and AltaVista are the same.) And they all point back to this sort of vortex of cached sites, or at least, that is the most sense I can make out of it...I'm not spending huge amounts of time coming to complex understanding of all this.
But anyway, back to Google and libraries: It is really surprising what actually isn't searchable by Google. Unless the site has gone through the complicated process of finding a place in the "big box of available websites" (as I think of it), chances are, it won't be found. So back the Chronicle article, there's a ton of information on the web that Google just doesn't find, because it hasn't found a way into the "big box". Web crawlers and what not don't always know what to do with scholarly types of information. Even if you were to Google verbatim the name of the online database, you woudn't find it, because it's not in the "big box."
This post doesn't really have a thesis, but if it did, perhaps it could be "ask your librarian", as some would have it. Or "be more creative in searching". Or "don't trust Google." Or whatever... But this post doesn't have a thesis. And I'll probably still go to Google for every day searching.
Comments
In case you are interested, my job is all about search engine strategies. I probably spend 50% of my time trying to outsmart the search engines.
Posted by: mom2 | June 2, 2004 7:27 AM
google does search actual websites. and it's all about links. if the page is linked from enough other pages, it'll be found eventually (provided there isn't a login or some such thing required)
Posted by: bobw | June 2, 2004 8:08 AM
yes, I guess I was thinking more Google just doesn't search websites cold as much as much as it crawls and categorizes websites into the "big box of available websites to Google". Is that an accurate picture? I mean because there's a lot out Google doesn't hit if you were to search for something.
Posted by: Jeannette | June 2, 2004 9:34 AM