Roy TennantCalifornia Digital Library

Is Metasearch Dead?

Outline

What Really Drives GoogleWhat Google Scholar IsWhat Google Scholar is NotGoogle Scholar as Commercial Database ReplacementGoogle Scholar as a Metasearch ReplacementIn the End…

What Google Scholar Is

“Scholarly” information: journal articles, papers, books, dissertations, technical reports, etc.

Non-scholarly information cited by scholarly sources

One of many Google initiatives/tools/ projects, and one that is not particularly well-supported

A web crawl of content deemed appropriate, with citations parsed from full-text

A demonstration of supreme faith in the efficacy of web crawling and full-text parsing

An experiment

What Google Scholar is Not

A human-created abstracting and indexing serviceA service with:– Accurate metadata– Authority control– Assigned subject terms from a controlled

vocabulary– Many of the features that most commercial

databases provide

Google Scholar as Commercial Database Replacement

Coverage/Scope

Timeliness

Recall and Precision

Relevance

Accuracy

Output

Coverage/Scope

?

Timeliness

Recall and Precision

Relevance

The jury is still out on relevance of results returned on specific query terms

But that isn’t the only relevance factor…

Relevance for a particular audience…

…and/or purpose

First page:Zero results with general information on tsunamis that an undergraduate would find useful

First page:3 results with useful information7 relief effort sitesAt least 7 sponsored links (ads)

First page:20 sites with useful information

Accuracy

Output

What output? No ability to:– Email citations– Download citations– Reformat citations

Google Scholar as Metasearch

It’s as much about what you don’t search as what you do

Unless Google Scholar becomes something very different than what it is today, it will never provide the solution libraries seek in a metasearch tool

Libraries need the ability to unify searching of hetereogenous sources that apply to a specific audience and/or purpose

In the End…