Chat Room: The Online Engines That Could
RSSSearch tools have come far. Should librarians be worried?
By Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 03/01/2004
Google has two faces. It seems, at time, like A librarian's best friend—quickly locating lots of helpful information for the students we serve. Other times, it's our worst enemy, since many kids believe that they can find everything they need by simply using one search engine. We need to remind kids that it's also important to look in the library's catalog and subscription databases. Plus, there are other valuable search tools besides Google—although none of them are perfect.
If students type the word "dolphins"—meaning the aquatic animal—into Google, many of the links they receive will be about the Miami Dolphins football team. In the past, they'd need to do a Boolean search—"dolphins NOT football"—to eliminate the unrelated references. Now there are several search tools that sort the information into meaningful categories.
One of the best, WiseNut (www.wisenut.com), automatically sorts information on dolphins into eight major categories accompanied by the number of links found. A recent search on WiseNut yielded the following results: Miami Dolphins (32), Whales [and] Dolphins (9), Bottlenose Dolphins (4), Wild Dolphins (6), Swim with Dolphins (11), Dolphin Research (4), Dolphins: Encounters (4), Dolphins Tickets (8), and Others (94). This last grouping contained some sites that were spot on, such as sites from environmental groups that oppose the killing of dolphins by fishing fleets. Others included a page called "Celine Dion Tickets," from a ticket agency that also offered [Miami] Dolphins tickets. But WiseNut is far from flawless. Most of the results in the "Wild Dolphins" category, for example, link directly to Caribbean resorts. Obviously, the artificial intelligence that sorts these sites isn't yet on a par with a librarian's classification skills. Vivisimo (www.vivisimo.com), another search tool that classifies sites, has similar virtues and warts—although it appears to be slightly more comprehensive than WiseNut.
WiseNut and Vivisimo can be a big help for students who struggle to come up with alternate search terms and topics. But when you type in a search term, the first two sites that appear on their hits pages are often commercial ads that have been programmed to appear when a searcher enters certain key words. When you type in the word "dolphins," for example, you'll get several links to sites that hawk National Football League memorabilia and vacations to Jamaica. Every free search engine needs to make money, but at least Google places its ads on the right-hand side of the screen and clearly identifies them as "sponsored sites." If you encourage kids to use WiseNut and Vivisimo, be sure to tell them to skip the ads.
Search engines have made great gains in translating foreign languages. AltaVista's Babel Fish Translation Service (http://babel.altavista.com) translates English Web pages or passages of text into eight languages, including Russian, Spanish, and Korean. Because a "translation engine" performs the work, the renderings aren't perfect, but they're improving all the time. And translation tools can lead kids to some fascinating discoveries. Using Babel Fish, I translated "dolphins" into the Portuguese equivalent, "golfinhos," searched the Web for that term, and found some Portuguese and Brazilian sites on dolphins with great pictures. There are other translation sites, such as the ones at www.freetranslation.com and www.tranexp.com: 2000, but they exist primarily to sell software and services; it's best to stick to Babel Fish.
Searching for graphics has greatly improved, too. If you worked in a library before the coming of the Web, you probably remember sweating through a request for a specific image, such as a dolphin leaping. At AltaVista's Image Search (www.altavista.com/image), students can type in "dolphin leaping," specify the size of the image, and indicate whether they want it in black and white or color. As with the other search tools, strange things can happen. Searching for a photo of a "dolphin dive" resulted in lots of appropriate images as well as pictures of a children's beach party without a single dolphin, and a strange object called a "Dolphin's Dive Aroma Lamp."
Search engines have made great progress in the last few years, but none of them can compete with a librarian. It takes a skilled human being to sort through sites and images, and to know which ones meet a student's needs.
Librarians aren't in any danger of losing their jobs yet.
