[Sigia-l] Google vs. Knowledge Management

[Louise Ferguson]

At 12:36 31/01/2003 +0000, Nuno Lopes wrote:
>I use Google as my first shot engine for finding information around a
>subject that I have little experience with. Once I get deeper into the
>subject quite often Google can't give me good hits (same hits every time
>in the same order). Then I move to Yahoo or some kind of directory
>service that provides me a semantic net around the subject that I'm
>learning. This is usually provided by a specialized site.
>
><snip>
>
>Google stimulates fashion. Deep knowledgeable articles are almost never
>found through a Google search IMO. But is a nice place (if not the best)
>to start researching on a subject.

Google and other search engines (each have their strengths) are often used 
by professional translators to determine whether certain terms have real 
currency. This can be in highly specialised fields, such as little corners 
of pharmaceuticals or medicine. For example, if you're looking into CT 
scanning of brains of stroke victims, Google will produce most of the 
terminology to do with methodologies, equipment, results etc in several 
languages.

This idea of search engine results as language corpus is handy - what other 
way could a freelance translator find this stuff out -?, but needs to be 
used with care, clearly. Google comes into its own here - helping to rank 
sources in terms of quality, although clearly the translator also has to 
quality control (since when did you believe a so-called medical English 
term on a Peruvian website?).

Of course the spanner in the works is the introduction by Google of 
so-called intelligent algorithms such as 'did you mean...? (no I didn't! - 
the translator generally seeks the rare, not the obvious). Plus the 'if the 
term doesn't exist even once on Google it doesn't exist' could I suppose 
become quite a limiting position (think of translating up-to-the-minute 
research papers, for example).

Louise Ferguson