Roy Tennant California Digital Library Is Metasearch Dead?

Outline What Really Drives Google What Google Scholar Is What Google Scholar is Not Google Scholar as Commercial Database Replacement Google Scholar as a Metasearch Replacement In 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 service A 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 information 7 relief effort sites At least 7 sponsored links (ads)

First page: 20 sites with useful information

Accuracy

Output What output? No ability to: – 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…