Phil Bradley's Blog

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

 

I stumbled across Google Librarian today, and it's not good. Firstly, it is not affiliated with Google, and is not endorsed by them. Quite how long they'll be able to hang onto the name is interesting, and why Google didn't think to register it in the first place is another interesting question, but there you go.

Anyway, having got that out of the way, the site itself offers various options - Google Explained (taken from the Wikipedia: Google is a very large and popular search engine on the World Wide Web of the Internet) Google services overview, where the site tells you about various Google options, and why they're useful for Librarians - Google Earth is fun to play around with if you are bored apparently.

There's a tutorial (with incorrect, out of date information in it), some advanced search techniques (to be added by November 28th), understanding results, Firefox and Google, Google Watch (rumours, coming soon), and a discussion board.

I have no idea who has set this up, because they don't tell us. In short, it has currently very little value at all. I don't like knocking things, and am always keen to see what new things people come up with, but in this case, I'm sorry - I can't see any point in it at all. Perhaps it'll improve shortly, at which point I'll be happy to eat my words.

Phil 10:51 AM