Post on 08-May-2015
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But it’s all free on GoogleMaintaining the quality of information
Learning Resources Forum, City College Plymouth16th November 2012
Karen Blakemankaren.blakeman@rba.co.uk, http://www.rba.co.uk/
Twitter: @karenblakeman
11/04/23 www.rba.co.uk 1This presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
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Why do we use Google?
Often gives 'good enough' results with minimal effort from
the searcher
Great coverage
Personalisation
Problems?
Google thinks it knows best when it comes to the search
strategy
Too much information
Personalisation
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How Google makes improvements to its search algorithm - YouTube http://youtu.be/J5RZOU6vK4Q
500-600 changes a year to its algorithms
20,000 experiments a year
Google personalises according to
Location
What you have searched on in the past
What you have looked at in the past
What others at your IP address have searched for and looked at
Who is in your social networks
Likes, +1s, blocked pages and sites
What you’ve shared with others
What others have shared
What you had for breakfast, is there an ‘r’ in the month, is there a full moon tonight.......
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Two major changes
Google no longer looks for all of your words in a page
No more "+" sign in Google web search to force an exact
match search
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Biggest change of all
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“...combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience."
"we're more excited than ever to build a seamless social experience, all
across Google"
Toward a simpler, more beautiful Google http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/toward-simpler-more-beautiful-google.html
YouTube
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Plus a long list of videos mentioned by people in my Google+ circles
Targeted advertising?!
Based on web search activity
Based on location
Effect of YouTube activity on web search?
YouTube activity now affects web search
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Videos occupy top 12 slots
Results from Chrome Incognito
Oi, Google! NO!! http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2012/10/18/oi-google-no/
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Word cloud of top 20 results for a Google search on Prague (web history and social networks switched off, cookies cleared)
Word cloud of top 20 results for a Google search on Prague (signed in to Google+ account, social networks and web history enabled)
Google.com Gmail/Drive field trial
Can you share the information you find?
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P R I V A T E
C O N F I D E N T I
A LR E S T R I C T E D A C C E S S
Want to switch personalisation off?
Log out of your Google account when searching
Actively manage search cookies, automatically delete cookies
How to delete cookies
http://aboutcookies.org/Default.aspx?page=2
Use Chrome Incognito (Chrome owned by Google!)
Firefox – Tools, Private Browsing
Internet Explorer – Tools, InPrivate Browsing
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Google Knowledge Graph and carousel
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Google carousel
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Do you know how to....
use Google Verbatim?
use Google intext: ?
use Google daterange: ?
use the options in the Google results page sidebar?
remove or block specific sites from a search?
get rid of personalisation?
make Google include the supplemental index in your search?
concentrate on finding research papers?
use other search tools? (DuckDuckGo, Bing, Million Short, Yandex.com, Blekko)?
identify who is really behind a web site?
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Google Scholar
http://scholar.google.com/
A useful place to start your research or if you are looking for a specific paper
No source list, not comprehensive and does not cover many key scientific publications
Both peer-reviewed and un-reviewed articles, pre-prints, institutional repositories, references to books, citations
Author search unreliable, search on year of publication unreliable
Good for open access journals
Many links are to priced articles
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Google Scholar
Very good that Google Scholar covers Open Access journals, but Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have had to weed out 188 titles that were of poor quality.
Even Hartmann Flood førstebibliotekar, UBiT, NTNU, Trondheim
“Google Scholar på godt og vondt” Foredrag på fagreferentkonferansen 7/6 2012 http://folk.ntnu.no/flood/foredrag/gsfagref.ppt (in Norwegian so use Google translations)
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Google Scholar
Metadata mega mess in Google Scholar
http://www.jacso.info/OIR/2010-01-jacso-metadata-mega-mess-in-Google-Scholar.doc
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~jacso/savvy-mcb.htm
Can librarians trust resources found on Google Scholar? Yes…
and no
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/09/17/can-science-students-and-researchers-trust-resources-found-on-google-scholar-yes-and-no/
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Google Scholar
Bad Google Scholar Results | Academic Librarian https://blogs.princeton.edu/librarian/2012/10/bad-google-scholar-results/
Beyond coverage #ili2012 http://www.slideshare.net/bmkramer/beyond-coverage-ili2012
Bianca Kramer, Eric Sieverts
Presentation given at Internet Librarian International, October 2012. Compares Google Scholar with Scopus and Web of Science
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http://academic.research.microsoft.com/
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Christopher Rhodes zeolites
http://academic.research.microsoft.com/
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Co-authors
Citations
Social and personalisation can be good
Keep up with conferences
What are people saying
Different perspective on a subject
Need to search within the network itself, which means you must have an account
Use specialist search tools – follow Phil Bradley on Slideshare
http://www.slideshare.net/philbradley
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Bing
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1. Understand how the search engines work, and in particular Google
2. Learn how to search more effectively and how to use the Google alternatives
3. Keep up to date!
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Keeping up to date
Inside Search http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/
Official Google Blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
SearchReSearch http://searchresearch1.blogspot.co.uk/
Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com/
Search Engine Watch http://searchenginewatch.com/
Karen Blakeman’s Blog http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/
Phil Bradley's weblog http://philbradley.typepad.com/
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