Legal Research

Google Further Fragments Itself

Google announced today that they’ve begun digitizing millions of article from magazines such as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony.  The articles are part of Google Book Search.  If you want to search ‘em specifically, Google advises that you use the GBS Advanced Page, which now has a Magazines radio button in the Content section.  According to Google, “Eventually, we’ll also begin blending magazine results into our main Google.com search results.”

IMHO blending results is something Google is crappy at.

Let’s start with my favorite Google Web search query: implants malpractice.  It usually returns ~400,000 hits, mostly blogs, lawyer homepages, and junk.  No book results.  Every once in a while, the results page will include a tiny Books link at the top of the page, in the light blue stripe, but you have to look closely for it.  If you click it, you’ll find an additional 700 hits, including Medicine on Trial: A Handbook with Cases, Laws, and Documents.  Bingo — right on point.  Why isn’t it featured in the Web search hit list?

Recently Google announced that they’re digitizing old newspaper articles and images from LIFE magazine.  So let’s look for them in the Google Web search results.  How about pittsburgh pirates 1960 world series newspaper articles?  More than 14,000 hits, but none (at least in the top 50) are from the digitzed news archive.  Yet here’s one from the archive that’s spot on from the October 25, 1960 edition of the St. Petersburg Times.  Again, why hasn’t this article been blended into the Web search results?

OK, let’s turn to LIFE images.  A search for apollo 8 earthrise pictures gives me a results page with 4 images at the top, none of which are from the LIFE archive, even though it has at least one of them.  One more time — what’s up with the blending?

Google is doing some amazing and admirable things with digitizing old content.  But this content is essentially invisible to anybody who doesn’t know enough to look for it.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on December 09, 2008 (boomark / email).