Enough with the Google-bashing

I'm just as happy as the next person to be paranoid about huge corporate entities trying to dominate our lives but this attack on Google by UK Observer columnist Henry Porter is pure insanity.

In it he identifies Google as a "classic monopoly that destroys industries and individual enterprise in its bid for ever greater profits." You either agree with Google, he says, or you feel "the weight of its boot on your windpipe."

He then goes on to blame Google for the demise of newspapers. He hints darkly that in some future time of "profound challenges", Google may decide to cut newspapers off from their audience. The company is "delinquent and sociopathic", a "nightmarish 11-year-old" which "needs to be stopped in its tracks" etc.

How silly can you get? We're talking about a search-engine here. Its bread and butter are links and snippets of content. It's no more illegal or immoral for Google to use content in this way than it would be for you or me.

Indeed the thought of putting a restriction on this use is far more worrisome than anything Porter can come up with.

But the truth is, Porter really doesn't come up with much. Once you sweep away the invective, you're pretty much left with nothing other than Google is big and successful at what it does.

If this is the best a 'journalist' can produce, it explains the plight of newspapers far better than anything Google allegedly has done.

[h/t Keith Teare]

Cart before Horse with Aquabrowser in Columbus

They recently installed the Aquabrowser at the Columbus Metropolitan Library (CML). This is how the head of IT over there explained it to the Columbus Dispatch:

"We're accommodating what people are used to seeing -- people who just want to plug in a search term and get their list." [h/t Lorcan Dempsey]

What people are "used to seeing"? That animated tag-cloud doohickey?

Unless they really do things differently in Columbus, I can't imagine anyone (other than library staff) ever seeing one of these things or knowing the least what to do with it.

I mean, you can almost predict that the color-coding of the whirlin', spinnin' topics will be totally lost on the average user. Equally as bewildering is why they bothered to include what suspiciously looks like instructions (instructions?) on the main search page that attempt to explain enigmatic terms such as "Search", "Discover" and "Refine".

Confused yet? The newspaper article quotes one user as calling it "distracting" while another thinks it may not be "as intuitive as they think it is".

Touchée. Like Second Life and the Kindle, we have the implementation of a technology that has yet to receive the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" from the public. In other words, there's no indication of widespread acceptance or adoption on the part of our users. This is precisely the wrong approach to take.

Lastly, it doesn't help that a keyword search on "Treasure Island" only turns up the book by Robert Louis Stevenson on Page 2 of the search results.

Maybe they were focusing on the wrong thing?

P.S. In contrast, check out the results for Google and Amazon.