I cleaned out one of my desk drawers today and came across a useful handout for searching with Google. Believe it or not there are numerous operators that can be used to sift through all of the worthless junk out there! For more information check out the Google Guide.

Basic Operations:

   boats ~gloassary - Finds glossaries and dictionaries about
   boats.
   cat dog - Finds the words "cat" and "dog."
   cat -siamese - Finds cat but not siamese.
   "I am batman" - Finds the exact phrase "I am batman."
   fortune-telling - Returns all forms hyphenated or otherwise.
   shoes nike OR adidas - Finds "nike shoes" or "adidas shoes."
   define:skeptic - Defines the word skeptic.

Site Restrictions:

   link: - Find pages that link to another site
   (i.e. link:amillion.us).
   site: - Search only one website
   (i.e. Christmas site:www.census.gov).
   [#]..[#] - Search between numbers. (i.e. Scrubs 2003..2007).

Special Queries:

   book - Search a full-text book
   (i.e. book Great Expectations).
   weather - Find the weather somewhere
   (i.e. weather Columbia MO).
   stocks: - Check your stocks (i.e. stocks: goog).
   phonebook: - Show all listings (i.e. phonebook: MoDOT MO).
   rphonebook: - Show residential numbers 
   (i.e. phonebook: AJ Million).
   info: - Find info on a page (i.e. info:weblog.amillion.us).
   related: - Show all listings
   (i.e. related:weblog.amillion.us).

Many of these aren’t that usefull but it’s always handy to know you can do much, much more than conduct a simple search.

Over at the Angry Librarian there is a really sobering debate going on about Libraries, Google, and the efforts of librarians to provide the best possible service to patrons. For those of you unaware, librarians have had mixed feelings on search engines for quite some time. On one hand they make our jobs easier. But, on the other hand they’re little more than tools. Very effective multi-million dollar tools, perhaps, but still them nonetheless. Our patrons like to use them instead of us too!

Anyway, the Angry Librarian brings up something called the “Reference Abstract” which is basically a search engine that returns accurate information for it’s users in a Googlesque manner. Think of it as Wikipedia, Yahoo, et al. with an academic checking up to make sure the sources are always valid. But there’s a catch and it’s a big one. The Angry Librarian notes:

“Consider the competition, which for the most part is Google. Google makes a boatload of money. They can afford to pay the best software engineers and programmers in the country and give them a lot of support in their work. Their revenue is based on competitively creating products that people want to use because they work so darn well. And libraries? They hire library school graduates.

In case the penny hasn’t dropped, let’s do the comparison in our heads. On the one hand, we have the best engineers and programmers in the country, and on the other hand we have…library school graduates. Unless the ALA can lobby successfully for some anti-competitive labor standards favoring librarians, I don’t see how libraries are going to compete. They’re not businesses. They don’t have cadres of programmers working in the bowels of the library developing neat stuff. If they’ve got someone who can build a decent website and make a wiki they feel like they’ve achieved some sort of technological wonder. If some librarians feel like they’re hot stuff at creating search engines, let them apply to work at Google and see how far they get.”

An obvious rant, for sure, but as someone with a background in digital libraries she makes a really good point! Librarians just can’t expect to create the neat stuff that most of the private sector does. It’s not our job. We don’t have the technological talent and we don’t have the money. That said, I’m curious as to what the rest of you think. Is this necessarily the case? If so, does that mean libraries are going to start dying off? Did I waste two years of my life in library school?