Calling All Librarians

I just received a copy of Inside Larry and Sergey's Brain by Richard Brandt. I'm generally pretty bad at reading this type of book and getting a review out in a timely manner, so this time I'm going to try my best to write a review of the first chapter.

However, before I get that far, I've formed an impression based on the opening analogy. Brandt starts off by conjuring an image of the library of Alexandria. He then fast forwards to present day, drawing an analogy between that collection and Google - Google is the librarian for the web. Right off the bat I feel this analogy is weak. To me, a librarian - a good one - is someone who knows firstly about the relationship between information and location and secondly about how to elicit enough information from the enquirer to leverage this knowledge. A really good librarian will actually be able to find you the right information, not just the book in which it is captured.

Google's search engine has an entirely different model. It doesn't elicit information from the user in order to apply some organized knowledge to help find the right result. It responds to a direct stimulus relying on the users skill in search query tuning.

Am I being pedantic? Perhaps, but the tech media has found it easy to elevate certain companies by analogies which provide them with super human powers that little deep understanding results. Remeber the phrase "database of intentions"?

Google (and other search companies) are businesses whose product is the audience and whose customers are advertisers.

Comments

[stevenb]

Since the web is completely disorganized and offers no information control, perhaps "google as the librarian for the web" is a fitting analogy. If librarians were truly responsible for the web, it would be much better organized and it would be easier to find high quality content. I think you've got the right idea. A traditional or even digital-age librarian is much more focused on personalized help that extends into the evaluation of information. Google returns information. There is no ability to sort information based on currency, reputation of the author, etc. You just get an information dump. Librarians work to get you to the best, highest quality information. And they don't overload you. They understand you only have so much time to devote to a project so they give you a reasonable amount of information to work with. Google may be the librarian for the web, but ultimately it is a bad analogy. Google is an index to the web. That's all.

[Bob Watson]

Depends upon the type of librarian being evoked. Google *is* rather like a technical services librarian, creating order out of the chaos of form. Google *is not* like a reference librarian who (ideally) is creating order out of the chaos of information (in hopes that it leads to knowledge on the part of the information seeker).

[shel Israel]

I absolutely love Richard L. Brandt's Library at Alexandria analogy to Google. I think Richard painted a picture that accurately depicts what Google has done. Your gripe seems to be that Google is adapted for the Information Age. Of course it is.