What is a browser? - UPDATED

Quick! Somebody ask 50 students if they know what a browser is!

Do you think more than 8% will know? Because that's the percentage of New Yorkers in Times Square knew in a short survey by Google. [waxy]

update

I posted the above in the early morning because I thought that this shocking statistic would suggest that libraries have to seriously rethink what we call our online products and services.

But the more I thought about it, the more got to thinking that 8% has got to be a bogus number. If Firefox has a 22% market share then more than 8% of the general population knows enough about web browsers to download the program and use it instead of Internet Explorer.

The larger point that I believe the video was trying to make was that the web experience is the same as the search engine experience. And now Google Chrome, of which the video is actually about, now makes a lot more sense to me.

Using Google and FriendFeed to Create a Collaborative Research Environment

Some months ago, I suggested that one way to measure of a success of a library's discovery system is to compare it to Google. I've been thinking about extending this measuring stick to the rest of the support that libraries provide to their researchers. So, I created a Google account for a fictional Cloud Researcher.

After creating a Gmail account for "Cloud Researcher" I started a Google Reader account for her. It was shockingly easy to add an RSS feed of the most recent issues to the more well known journals such as Nature and Science. Now my researcher can stay up to date in her field.



Google Reader makes it easy to share items by allowing instant publishing to a clippings blog. (This feature will prove important later on)



I then created a customized Google search engine so whenever my researcher needs to refer or research, she can just search this index of just the journals and websites that she trusts. If she wants to cast a wider net, she can always opt to search with Google Scholar or even plain old vanilla Google.



If her affiliated academic library provides authentication by IP address, then our researcher can keep up with her journal reading on campus without ever visiting the library's website even once - even if she's off-campus by using Windows XP Remote Desktop option to access her work computer. And if she has a loving, caring library, she can authenticate and access research using LibX, which also comes in handy when she uses Google Books.

I'm glad I actually went through the exercise of actualizing this example because in doing so, I had a small epiphany which was this: the future of learning online space is going to be an aggregation of online services. I realized this when I started playing with FriendFeed.

I've been using FriendFeed for about a week now and I still find it a strange beast. The way I would describe it is FriendFeed = Twitter + RSS reader. I think FF is an improvement on Twitter because it allows others to comment directly to a post. But FF is not a conventional RSS reader like Bloglines or Google Reader as the emphasis is on following friends - not publications. But what you can do with FriendFeed is create different 'rooms' for your different circle of friends. I created a room called The Cloud Research Lab Room.



What would happen if FriendFeed could share structured bibliographic citations from Zotero?

I think it could be something wonderful.

The index re-mixed

Once upon a time, there were three ways to find an article on the topic you were interested in.

1. Browse the journals until you found something relevant and then use that article's bibliography to find other articles
2. Ask someone well-read if they know of an article on your topic
3. Use a periodical index

Nowadays there is an additional option

1. use a search engine like Google

It is very difficult to determine how many academic library users are using Google instead of library-licensed periodical indexes in their researching. HighWire reported that Google is responsible for 56% of the referred traffic to their journal publications. (if any of you out there know of similar evidence, could you let me know via a comment or email?)

At the same time, libraries are now offering more indexes than ever before. But how many index choices are enough? And perhaps more importantly, are we offering too many alternatives? There is a growing recognition that we are scaring many of our users away with too much choice. To solve this problem, we have been investing in metasearch. It's a compromise that allows librarians to keep all their expensive, specialized indexes while offering only one interface to their users.

So why not allow users to customize and save their own metasearch engine not unlike Google's customizable search engines?

And what if recognize that we have a track record of not being able to match our users needs with periodical indexes and be done with them completely? Let's dive down another level of granularity and create a platform that allows users to create their own customized index that searches just the subjects and / or the journals that interest them. Why are playing tens of thousands of dollars for someone else do this for us?

Is Google Dead Without Metasearch?

When Roy Tennant spoke to the 2005 SMUG Annual Meeting, the title of his presentation was Google Scholar: Is Metasearch Dead? And I remember that during his talk, Roy searched for the word hamlet in Google Scholar and the first hit returned was Hamlet and the Holodeck.

Now if you search Google Scholar for hamlet, you get this article: Partition testing does not inspire confidence [program testing]. Why? Its by D. Hamlet.

Search plain-vanilla Google for hamlet and the first entry is not surprisingly, from Wikipedia. What's amusing, although not together unsurprising, is the the Spark Notes for Hamlet outranks the actual play. What was surprising to me is that if you search for Hamlet in Google Book Search, you get only 6 hits returned. The University of Windsor has 95 titles that begin with that word. Search WorldCat for Hamlet and you are offered over 13,000 items.

Far from being dead, it looks like Google needs Metasearch.

We're Information Literacy. Understand? Do not Demonstrate

The W in WILU stands for Workshops and I attended one entitled, Teaching on the Edge of Chaos. In it, Bryan Miyagishima and Robert Hautala put forwards a model for teaching that recognizes three elements in play: the student, the task and the environment. They suggested that since you can't change the student, you should concentrate on changing the task and/or the environment for better learning.

Joel Burkholder started his presentation by asking the audience what exactly are we librarians, for lack of a better word, trying to 'fix' in our students research habits. Some of the answers (in short form) that came back were:

keyword searching
starting with Google / Wikipedia
full text only
browse few
linear process
first hit reliance
only recent articles
reliance on one source
giving up
don't check scope notes
no plan
no or poor evaluation skills
don't ask for help

Joel then asked the audience, how many of these could we 'pin the blame for' on Google? He suggested that the habitual (and largely successful and satisfied) use of search engines in our students' lives are responsible for their searching 'framework' that they take into the classroom lab or library. Since this framework is working for them, they see no need to change it no matter how many times librarians tell them that there are better ways to research. Burkholder believes that asking students to perform mechanical skills that illustrate a new searching framework is also not sufficient to make students change their ways.

Instead, he suggests we should :

1. find ways to make the student confront their beliefs and reveal preconceptions
2. discuss and evaluate these preconceptions
3. create cognitive conflict
4. offer an intelligible, plausible and fruitful alternative framework

At this point, I realized that Joel was teaching the use of a framework for teaching by using that very same framework for teaching. Coincidently, I found it intelligible, plausible and fruitful.

More evidence against indexes

Van Orsdel and Born report that Google has relentlessly ‘strengthened its claim as the ubiquitous front door to the web and all of its content’, including scholarly content. They found that Google is responsible for referring 56% of the users of HighWire journals, and our own study shows that over 70% of researchers use it routinely to find scholarly content. Moreover, web search engine referrals also appear to account for the vast majority of accesses to institutional repositories.

[Researchers' Use of Academic Libraries and their Services]

OCUL Search Engine

As you can tell from my previous post, I frequently check out the other university libraries in my province. In order to make this snooping easier, I've created an Ontario University Libraries Search Engine.

That being said, I'm not completely Ontario-centric in my worldview... although many Canadians outside of Ontario would suggest that if one is from here it is impossible to be otherwise.

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

I learned from The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture that it is thought that 30% of the web is porn. I was also reminded of the time before Google when most search engines would regularly have porn sites in their results of even the user had the most benign of intentions. That pretty much stopped once Google and its vastly superior indexing algorithms appeared on the web and well, then pretty much took over.

John Battelle begins the book not the conventional way that I have done by mentioning the superior results that Google first brought but reminds us that every search begins with an intention and that Google has, in its sea of servers, the largest database of human wants the world has ever seen. This is just one of the reasons why Google is increasingly becoming a conduit for business on the internet and why businesses like Amazon are getting into the business of search.

This book is more than a simple history of a business - and not just because Google is positioned to be more than just another company. At the moment, Google is the best "Yellow Pages" of the Internet but in the future it could very well become a new layer of Internet infrastructure. Ironically, after reading the book, I'm more wary of this future because Google now seems much more human to me. Recommended.