[Sigia-l] re: the future of search

[Andrew McNaughton]

On Mon, 29 Jul 2002, Peter Merholz wrote:

> Wow. An otherwise cogent response totally torpedoed by this coda:
>
> > Nobody does "research" on the web. They may want to pretend to themselves
> > that they do, but they don't. You can certainly get some interesting and
> > useful information very quickly, and you may not, but let's not delude
> > ourselves into thinking that anybody is doing "research". A thesis demands
> > much more than a couple of Google searches! Or at least, I hope it will
> for
> > a few more years!
>
> This smacks of academic snobbery to a disturbing agree.
>
> Of course people do research on the Web. "Research" isn't just about writing
> theses....
>
> As a tool for people researching in order to support immediate job
> functions, I'd argue that the Web is MASSIVE. Because, often, you don't need
> deep. You need to survey the landscape, and find a few interest points.
> Something to put in a PowerPoint deck.
>
> And, yes, that's "research."

It's not a question of depth.  People always did do surveys of what's
around in libraries as well as deep research.  Equally, people doing high
level academic research are actively using the web do collect and
disseminate their material - indeed that's where the internet comes from.

The limitation of google is not so much in what it can find as in the
extent to which it can tell you whether you've missed anything important.

The role of academic journals as mediators is most of the difference,
rather than the libraries.  Web publishing and the mainstream web search
engines have little with which to replace the peer review process.
Indeed the value in manual cataloguing has a great deal to do with quality
review in the selection of what gets included at all.

Andrew