Wierd stuff
Nov. 20th, 2006 01:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumThe internet is a vast place. It was larger before Google became a verb. Search engines bring it all, in some ways, to a point.
Maia hates google. Mostly, I think because she grew up just a little too late. Me? I probably have advantages, in the art of Google-Fu, because in addition to a head for trivia, I did lots of associational research in high-school, and in college. I wrote an opinion column in high school. So I'd read the papers (there were three dailies, of a local nature, in the library, as well as the NYT, and the news-weeklies. Life, the Saturday Evening Post, etc., were dead, but there was still a large amount of copy to wade through in a day).
Those would lead me to follow up, and that was where my semester of Library Science helped.
We had a card catalog. They are dead now, replaced with computers, which is more than a pity, it's a loss.
Not so much because a computer is fundmentally different (though it is, and that affects things, sort of measuring a particle/wave affects its behaviour, so too the means with which we search for things. Look in the yard for a ball to toss for the dog. It's not the same if you make the search at night; and that search is differnt at midnight with a full-moon, than it is in the early dark with a flashlight), but that no two are the same.
Back in the old days, all libraries had the same database system. It didn't matter how they filed the books on the shelf (my high-school uses the Dewey Decimal System, my college the Library of Congress) the card catalog was the same. Subject, Author, Title.
Which meant it was easy to do associational searches. I almost never looked for the title card. I only used that when I didn't know what the book was about, or who wrote it.
With the author's name, I could see what else they'd written. If I knew the subject, I could find other books, by different authors, on the same thing.
These days the only one which really works the way it did, is Author. I can plug in Harold McGee and find all his books, and maybe some papers he's had published in periodicals the library is holding.
But if I want to just flip through the cards on cooking, it doesn't work that way.
So I have to be more precise to find titles I don't know.
With the right level of fiddling google will point me to almost anything I want to find. But it's harder, and some people can't do it well. I get frustrated, trying to use google to search for things I know I've written. Other people have no trouble finding me at random.
What brought this to mind?
Someone searched for John Peter Zengler, and libel (which seems a perfectly normal search string to me).
Something I wrote in March came up as the second entry.
Maia hates google. Mostly, I think because she grew up just a little too late. Me? I probably have advantages, in the art of Google-Fu, because in addition to a head for trivia, I did lots of associational research in high-school, and in college. I wrote an opinion column in high school. So I'd read the papers (there were three dailies, of a local nature, in the library, as well as the NYT, and the news-weeklies. Life, the Saturday Evening Post, etc., were dead, but there was still a large amount of copy to wade through in a day).
Those would lead me to follow up, and that was where my semester of Library Science helped.
We had a card catalog. They are dead now, replaced with computers, which is more than a pity, it's a loss.
Not so much because a computer is fundmentally different (though it is, and that affects things, sort of measuring a particle/wave affects its behaviour, so too the means with which we search for things. Look in the yard for a ball to toss for the dog. It's not the same if you make the search at night; and that search is differnt at midnight with a full-moon, than it is in the early dark with a flashlight), but that no two are the same.
Back in the old days, all libraries had the same database system. It didn't matter how they filed the books on the shelf (my high-school uses the Dewey Decimal System, my college the Library of Congress) the card catalog was the same. Subject, Author, Title.
Which meant it was easy to do associational searches. I almost never looked for the title card. I only used that when I didn't know what the book was about, or who wrote it.
With the author's name, I could see what else they'd written. If I knew the subject, I could find other books, by different authors, on the same thing.
These days the only one which really works the way it did, is Author. I can plug in Harold McGee and find all his books, and maybe some papers he's had published in periodicals the library is holding.
But if I want to just flip through the cards on cooking, it doesn't work that way.
So I have to be more precise to find titles I don't know.
With the right level of fiddling google will point me to almost anything I want to find. But it's harder, and some people can't do it well. I get frustrated, trying to use google to search for things I know I've written. Other people have no trouble finding me at random.
What brought this to mind?
Someone searched for John Peter Zengler, and libel (which seems a perfectly normal search string to me).
Something I wrote in March came up as the second entry.
