Web 2.0 Award winners? Where's Wikipedia? For me, Wikipedia, is the perfect example of everything that "Web 2.0" supposedly encompasses, and yet it's not even included. Instead I looked at clusty.com (which is an honourable mention in the "Trusted Search" category.)
Clusty.com is a great search alternative to Google. Granted Clusty is slower, where a search might take 1 second as opposed to 0.0000454 seconds, and gives fewer results i.e. University of Guelph got 705,700 hits vs 1,270,000 from Google. Ah, but the results are more usable. Note: more usable, not perfect.
Why is Clusty great? 1) Because it's results are "clustered" (which is the basis for its unfortunate* name) search results are sorted, roughly, by topic/emphasis. It's this sorting that helps people limit their search to what they really want. 2) For those who have already "googled" something this could be a great second search. 3) it's also an opportunity for us to demonstrate that we in libraryland *know* stuff. Cool stuff. Stuff that works. That libraries aren't just about "SHHHH!" and books anymore.
*Unfortunate name? I'm sure that the engineers at Google sleep well at night, because they know what I know; that large segments of middle America will never search with anything called cLUSTy. Personally, I like it, but I also don't have teenage children (and their virtue) to worry about.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment