The Googlization of Everything

Caleb Tucker-Raymond at ⌘f writes of various librarian reactions to Cuil:

... One theme is, “if you think Cuil is neat, you should try SearchMe”.

SearchMe may fill some of the same discovery and serendipity niche that Cuil is vying for, but its immediate appeal is that it looks a lot like Apples’ “Cover Flow” browse interface for the iPhone/iTouch (and something similar in OS X 10.5). There is an obvious ranked order, which infodoodads Jane points out is helpful, but still means that browsing is an essentially unidirectional journey.

Somewhat dishearteningly, most of the posts I’ve seen about SearchMe get no reaction. No one seems to be interested in analyzing what search engines are good for, only whether or not the interface is nice and if the results are good. The second theme in librarians’ reactions to Cuil is that the main way that we’ve gone about evaluating Cuil is by searching for our own names. ...

... Here is a kind of irony; Cuil is claiming the moral high ground by treating user data as completely private, and yet librarians complain that they are too anonymous in Cuil’s results.

I admit it, I searched myself on Cuil also. The initial results tell you a lot more about where and who I’ve been than where and who I am now, and that’s just the opposite of what Google values. Google’s paradigm props up the newest and the most popular web pages and clearly defines a hierarchy of value.

Cuil doesn’t seem to care as much. Librarians should love this.

We are always complaining that people value online information over print, digital over analog. We worry that too many people “satisfice” their information needs with the first few hits from Google. Some of us even worry that ordering results any way but alphabetically implies too much value to the resources at the top of the list and limits patrons’ freedom of inquiry by devaluing everything else.

And when it comes to search engines - at least for those of us blogging and sending e-mail to discussion lists - we won’t have it any other way. The third theme is a defense of Google as a gold standard for search engines. ...

...
We’re ignoring that people want it that way because Google does it that way, and we’re ignoring the fact that other ways to do it produce different results and are good for different purposes.

It’s time we started treating search engines like reference sources: pick them up, feel the weight, read the introduction, look for specific sample entries, even read random ones, gauge the editorial position, check out the index and other appendixes, and finally think about what kinds of things we would use it for.