Pushing the “I’m feeling lucky” button

Citation

O'Beirne, R. (2006), "Pushing the “I’m feeling lucky” button", Reference Reviews, Vol. 20 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/rr.2006.09920cag.001

Pushing the “I’m feeling lucky” button

As a very successful company it is of only passing interest, there are many such companies; as a technology it is not particularly at the cutting edge and again there are many more in a similar position. However, what makes us all sit up and take notice of Google is, well, Google itself. Its whole approach, for instance the ever-changing and witty images it uses as it logo. What other company would have the confidence to change its logo on an almost daily basis? Who else would have a mission to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and to take that ambition seriously?

Of course of most interest, particularly to us librarians, is the strange love-hate relationship we have with this mother of all search engines. Do we cringe when we read from the Google website statements like “an ‘I’m feeling lucky’ search means less time searching for web pages and more time looking at them”? A quick survey of colleagues has indicated that according to their usage patterns Google is very much in the ascendancy. It is always good to keep an eye on what is happening with search engines. How many of us fall into the habit of using one or maybe two and disregarding the others? Certainly in terms of market leadership and brand profile Google is by far the best known. Indeed the now common use of the verb term “to Google” should be evidence enough to show that this search engine has made an impact in many areas of our lives. The Google empire is one that continues to grow from its relatively humble beginnings. An interesting question that should be asked of all those who wish to work at management level in a library might be “how do you see collaborative partnerships between libraries and Google developing over the next five years?”

Because of its market share Google has clout. Tie-ins with Amazon, the other big internet presence, provide the user with seamless services, something which apparently the user wants. On top of this the integration of various push technologies is designed not only to make life easier for the user, but to market by stealth other related products and services.

A recent experience in the use of sponsored links, which are found on the right-side of the Google returned hits page, illustrates some of the pitfalls of attempting to dovetail these complex technologies. A search using the string “James Joyce” returned the predictably long list of hits in the main screen while half a dozen promising links were displayed on the right as sponsored links. One of these linked to a large supermarket chain that erroneously told me that James Joyce had, in 1994, written what appeared to be a children’s book called the Adventures of Ulysses. Somewhere the clever algorithm had fallen down. This automated database cataloguing is, without a doubt, very sophisticated but all technologies do have their limit.

I find the concept of push and pull technology quite useful when discussing some of the current information services available via the web. Of course every now and then a service or web site comes along which alters one’s perspective and challenges the rules. Recently I was introduced to Pandora. Pandora is part of the Music Genome Project which set out in the year 2000 to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. This was done by analysing and reducing music down to its very core – its genes. Re-assembling this and using powerful database technology it is possible to offer a unique musical service over the web. To sample this go to www.pandora.com

I was talking recently to a colleague about plagiarism where she made the point that anecdotal evidence would appear to suggest that plagiarism where it exists in academia is more likely the result of ignorance at worst and naivety at best. Outright malicious plagiarism is quite rare. But if we were to take the errors that can become compounded by technology such as the Ulysses example above, one could quite reasonably understand the difficulties of administering an anti-plagiarism policy within a large university. Lines of definition quite easily become blurred at the cutting edge of technology.

Ronan O’BeirneInternet Column Editor, Reference Reviews, and Principal Libraries Officer, Bradford Libraries, Archives and Information Service, Bradford, UK