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Pete Nancy K. Humphries gets to the heart of the matter in this Huffington Post piece. "Google often fails to serve people who search it or the people trying to get their sites noticed. All too often Google's results completely miss the mark.... Google will never equal the library in precision and accuracy because this company is too arrogant to even listen to a librarian. Google employees are young, so young they still believe that only they know how to do things. I personally witnessed a speaker from Google tell members of The American Society of Indexers at a San Francisco conference that Google had gotten rid of the one librarian on staff in Palo Alto. She was a former cataloger; she was too "nitpicky.""
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Dear Sri Ganesh,
Many Thanks for highlighting the issue which explains the supremacy of Libraries over the web based materials. The issue is well understood by many but they often speak the opposite. Especially during interviews for recruitment of Librarians.It is a very common tendency of a section of the recruiters to put pressure upon the candidates. But the practical thing is when the researchers are mostly engaged to the NET and rely upon the common Search Engines than reading aids, they often get shifted from serious research.
Just take an example. Try searching literature on Cholecystectomy.
The Google will present more than 6.5 LAKHS of references.
Now search Medline or Pubmed site, you will get around 14.6 THOUSAND references and these 14.6 K articles are professional technical articles published in research journals! So one can easily assess the relevance of an abstracting database over common search engines. No doubt the references are quite useful for writing features and popular articles, but when you mean serious business, like academic or research activities, such search engines often delivers many more materials which are not so relevant. You just imagine how tiring and time consuming will it be if you have to select relevant articles out of 6.5 Lakhs references!!
I think this justifies the impact & importance of Libraries and academic reading aids.
Thank you once again, for your post.
Sincerely,
Siddhartha S. Ray, Calcutta
Apples should be compared with Apples only and not with Oranges or Watermelons or with any other fruit for that matter. Both Librarians and Google have their own, important roles to play. The roles can at times be complementary in nature but should never play supplementary role to one another.
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