Wednesday, May 23, 2007

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.

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