MaisonBisson.com » search engines

Memory, Intimacy, And The Web

Casey Bisson — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 02:28:53 +0000

I’ve been thinking about it since Troy mentioned to me that he thought Google was ruining his memory. And I thought I found confirmation of it when I read Gladwell’s description of Daniel Wegner, et al’s Transactive Memory in Close Relationships:

When we talk about memory, we aren’t just talking about ideas and impressions and facts stored inside our heads. An awful lot of what we remember is actually stored outside our brains. Most of us deliberately don’t memorize most of the phone numbers we need. But we do memorize where to find them — in a phone book, or in our personal Rolodex.

You’d think this is where I say Google fits, but I’d argue it goes deeper. Gladwell continues:

Perhaps more important, though, we store information with other people. Couples do this automatically. …Wegner argues that when people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system — a transactive memory system — which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kinds of things.

This joint memory, claim Gladwell and Wegner argue, is part of what intimacy means.

So, perhaps there’s a continuum between phonebooks and life-partners. Not withstanding reports that 24% of Americans say the web can replace a significant other, where does today’s internet fit?

Before you answer that, consider eBay Fever and Anne Muxel’s Family Memory, a Sociology of Intimacy:

Family memory is also and above all a presence inside us which recalls itself to us on the basis of images, impressions, and sensations. When it opens up its doors, it lets out, as if by magic, a burst of odors, sounds, an anecdote, a familiar joke, an object, a photo, the voices of familiar characters, the memory of their bodies, of their gestures, like an image of a childhood place, a recipe, etc., all of these evocations working as cues to bring the past back into the present.

memory, intimacy, search engines, google, transactive memory, shared memory

WPopac Gets Googled

Casey Bisson — Thu, 04 May 2006 15:50:00 +0000

A discussion on Web4Lib last month raised the issue of Google indexing our library catalogs. My answer spoke of the huge number of searches being done in search engines every day and the way that people increasingly expect that anything worth finding can be found in Google.

There were doubts about the effectiveness of such plans, and concerns about how frustrating it might be for a searcher in California to find books (that he or she can’t access) in New Hampshire.

My answer to the first point was that once we start participating in the Google Economy, we’ll find our records well represented within it, and my answer to the second point is that we already have good solutions to that problem: ILL and OpenWorldCat. Examples: a Google search for my favorite author/friend/example returns with WPopac among the top results. And if you view one of the resulting records, you’ll see a link to “find in WorldCat Libraries.”

Thing is, it’s not just the stuff I’ve been linking to as examples that’s getting found in search engines. Listed below are the top 100 incoming search terms to WPopac from major search engines in the last week. The list is generated by bsuite, my multipurpose WordPress plugin, and the links lead to the item found with the search terms.

Some links will leave you scratching your head, others are clearly misdirected. But, I’m especially proud of this link, from a person who was especially happy to get a new book. Making our collections indexable also makes them linkable, and that means people can make libraries part of their lives — wherever their lives take them.

And this doesn’t just help Angie, it means faculty and students can link to library resources from class blogs or share them in AIM.

google economy, google in the catalog, lib20, libraries, library, library 20, library catalog, linking, links, loosely linked, opac, remix, search engines, wpopac

Information Behavior

Casey Bisson — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 00:16:08 +0000

It was more than a year ago that Lorcan Dempsey pointed out this bit from The Chronicle:

Librarians should not assume that college students welcome their help in doing research online. The typical freshman assumes that she is already an expert user of the Internet, and her daily experience leads her to believe that she can get what she wants online without having to undergo a training program. Indeed, if she were to use her library’s Web site, with its dozens of user interfaces, search protocols, and limitations, she might with some justification conclude that it is the library, not her, that needs help understanding the nature of electronic information retrieval.

So I’m continually surprised to find people defending our old, broken search systems in the face of pressure from internet search services that we’ve all come to depend on.

Thing is, where’s the greater criticism in this?

Google’s simplicity and impressive search prowess trick students into thinking they are good all-around searchers, and when they fail in library searches, they are ashamed as well as confused.

Does the above serve to emphasize the “laziness” and “intellectual inferiority” that seem to be the theme of so many of our discussions about “today’s students?” Or does it instead show how backward we and our systems are?

I second Peter Binkley’s retort, but I also want to point out the huge wedge being driven between academic libraries and our patrons. We see it in the two perspectives on that quote above. Right now it’s a matter of not meeting patron needs, but I’m also worried about what happens when those students become faculty, and later, administrators. How will they value the library then?

(Title graphic from GoogleAlive. Go play, it’s fun.)

google, information, information behavior, information search and retrieval, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, library systems, online behavior, peter binkley, search behavior, search engines, search practice, Steven Cohen, web searching

The Library vs. Search Engine Debate, Redux

Casey Bisson — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 17:14:46 +0000

A while ago I reported on the Pew Internet Project’s November 2005 report on increased use of search engines. Here’s what I had to say at the time:

On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine.

Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes searching a library OPAC.

Walt Crawford properly took me to task, noting:

The report that’s downloadable does show that people aren’t being asked an open-ended “what did you do on the Internet today?” question. They’re being asked to respond to a list. If “searching a library OPAC” isn’t on the list, it is absolutely guaranteed not to be in the results.

It’s taken me some time, but I’m finally following up on that point. The question seems to revolve around how the list of activities was generated, and to answer it I contacted project director Lee Rainie. Lee explained that the intent of the project and the surveys is to help us understand how people use the internet and does not consider other activities. Regarding the list of ten online activities in this survey, he noted that it was a list he chose as “an illustrative list, rather than comprehensive list.”

Lee was careful to emphasize the way he values libraries and wanted to be clear that though the Project has tracked 90 online activities in its many surveys, they haven’t yet asked internet users about their use of online library services. I don’t know if it was just because I was asking the questions, or if he’s been thinking about this for some time, but he did suggest that the project might include library-related questions in a future study.

I was putting Lee in a tough spot, as the real question we want him to answer is something along the lines of “did the survey not include questions about online library usage because it’s statistically insignificant or was it an oversight?” Lee is a smart guy, smart enough not to answer that — smart enough to avoid stepping into our internal debates — so the following is based on my continued research into the question, not my conversation with him.

As it turns out, while much of the most interesting data in the November 20 2005 report comes from the project’s phone survey, the report uses data from comScore to support those phone survey results. While Walt is right about the phone survey, the comScore data doesn’t appear subject to those limitations:

The comScore data cited in this report come from comScore Media Metrix, an internet audience measurement service that uses a massive cross-section of more than 1.5 million U.S. consumers who have given comScore explicit permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing.

In a comment to my previous post, KateZ expressed some concern that the comScore data was only tracking top search engines; comScore offers many reports based on their usage tracking, the qSearch report is a keyword optimization tool and doesn’t reflect the full breadth of data harvested by the company. It doesn’t answer the question on its own, but can we not assume that a company that makes is business by tracking the every online activity of its research subjects would investigate any library-related activity if such activity was significant enough to reveal trends in consumer interest or behavior?

Elsewhere, in the PIP’s August 11 2004 report on The Internet and Daily Life, we find some detailed insights on how those phone survey questions are selected:

To assemble a good list of activities, we followed insights gained from previous research and divided online activities into four categories: information seeking; communications; transactions; and entertainment. We chose several examples for each category. These examples are not meant to cover all kinds of activities, but rather to represent everyday tasks and typical recreations that Americans enjoy. We chose activities that would broadly represent what the Internet has to offer, that would resonate with a broad audience, and that would tap into our understanding of the Internet use gained from our past research. Recognizing, of course, our choice of particular activities might influence the findings, we tried to observe the specific but then draw generalizations from our observations.

And in the November 2 2005 report on Teen Content Creators and Consumers, we learn that the project uses focus groups and small surveys with open ended questions to help shape their research and larger surveys. In that case:

Four focus groups were also conducted with a total of 38 high school and middle school students.

…teens took an online survey of multiple choice, open-ended and short-answer-style questions…

Full details on page 25 of the PDF.

So, I can’t really offer the answers we all want, but my gut feeling is that if library usage was a statistically significant activity for American internet users, the Pew Internet folks would have picked up on it and asked more detailed questions.

Sadly, I’ve been so slow to followup on all this that it may not matter anymore. OCLC released their Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources report in early December. The report revealed that patrons are generally happier using search engines than their libraries when asked to rate both in terms of volume, quality, speed, and overall experience.

This is scary to some, but good news to the libraries that are willing to take advantage of it. It means the tools, the access, and the information literacy are all coming together for our patrons. Now it’s just up to us to participate.

I’ll be talking about this in my ALA Midwinter presentation, see you in San Antonio.

search engines, library, libraries, library usage, online library, online libraries, online activities, pew internet project, pew internet and american life project, internet, internet usage, online behavior, lib20, library20, library 2.0, library evolution, search engine, search engine use, web searching

More Trends In Online Behavior From Pew Internet

Casey Bisson — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 15:18:58 +0000

It turns out that the Pew Internet and American Life Project sort of keeps a blog. Here are some points from a November 2004 post by project director Lee Rainie regarding “surprising, strange, and wonderful data:”

The vast majority of most Internet users (80%) and many non-users (about 40%) expect that they will be able to find reliable information online when it comes to news, health care information, e-commerce, and government. They also report they would turn first to the internet when they have questions about health, news, government resources, and products. (Source: Survey September 2002) [emphasis added]

A third of online adults and a fifth of online teens say they use the internet to get information that is sensitive or embarrassing to discuss with another person.

As they gain more experience online, Americans become more serious in their internet use. Over time, they use the internet more for work, they spend more money on e-commerce, banking, and auctions, they pursue more activities, and they are more likely to use emails to for serious purposes such as expressing worries or seeking advice. (Source: Survey March 2001)

Between 30%-40% of internet users begin their hunt for health information, government services and political information using a search engine. (Source: Multiple surveys 2002-2003)

The above findings seem to scare many librarians, but I claim they suggest a bright future for libraries. Think about it, these folks probably would never have thought to use a library for these questions anyway, but search engines and the internet give us a way to reach them even when they aren’t specifically thinking of using our services.

The real risk, and the reason we have to move quickly to recognize these trends and serve these users is in this point:

Three-quarters of those who get health information online do not regularly check the source, sponsorship or timeliness of the material they find online. (Source: Survey June-August 2001).

libraries, library, search engines, patron behavior, internet use, search engine use, web searching, online behavior, pew internet project, pip, pew internet

OCLC Report: Libraries vs. Search Engines

Casey Bisson — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 05:33:08 +0000

So, the report was released Monday, and it’s actually titled Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005), but the part I’m highlighting here is the results of the question that asked users to compare their experiences with search engines against their experiences with libraries.

Here’s the quesiton:

Satisfaction with the Librarian and the Search Engine — by Total Respondents

Based on the most recent search you conducted through [search engine used most recently],how satisfied were you in each of the following areas?
Base: Respondents who have used a search engine.

Based on your most recent experience seeking assistance from a librarian for help with a search or locating information,how satisfied were you in each of the following areas?
Base: Respondents who have used a librarian.

It appears on page 22 of part two.

Sadly, search engines beat libraries on all four points: volume, quality, speed, and overall experience. These numbers are alarming, and many will see this wrongly. The correct way to see this is how much value search engines can bring to the library experience.

compare, future, google, google economy, internet, libraries, library, library 2.0, library20, oclc, oclc report, perception, perceptions, Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005), report, search engine, search engines, user behavior

Pew Internet Report: Search Engines Gain Ground

Casey Bisson — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:53:24 +0000

According to the recently released Pew Internet report on online activities:

On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine.

Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes searching a library OPAC.

tags: google, google vs. the opac, libraries, library, library catalog, opac, pew internet, pew internet and american life project, report, search engine, search engines

What’s In A Web Search?

Casey Bisson — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 01:31:47 +0000

Sometimes the answer isn’t as interesting as the question. Consider this note from Yahoo Buzz:

On Sunday, the day before the nomination became official, [searches for] Alito sprang up a sudden 320%.

Did searches for Alito spike on tips White House staffers, or were White House Staffers vetting their nominee via the search engines?

tags: buzz, google, judge alito, nomination, nominee, samuel alito, search, search engines, spike, supreme court, supreme court nominee, web search, white house, white house staffers, yahoo, yahoo search

Is Search Rank Group-think?

Casey Bisson — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 16:22:10 +0000

Way back in April 1997, Jakob Nielsen tried to educate us on Zipf Distributions and the power law, and their relationship to the web. This is where discussions of the Chris Anderson’s Long Tail start, but the emphasis is on the whole picture, not just the many economic opportunities at the end of the tail.

Here’s how it works with hits to websites:

a few sites become popular and form the “big head” at the left
a few more sites form the slope
a huge number of websites score very low and form the “long tail”

Nielsen adds these examples:

a language has a few words (“the”, “and”, etc.) that are used extremely often, and a library has a few books that everybody wants to borrow (current bestsellers)
a language has quite a lot of words (“dog”, “house”, etc.) that are used relatively much, and a library has a good number of books that many people want to borrow (crime novels and such)
a language has an abundance of words (“Zipf”, “double-logarithmic”, etc.) that are almost never used, and a library has piles and piles of books that are only checked out every few years (reference manuals for Apple II word processors, etc.)

But the point here is about Google (or Yahoo, etc.) search results ranking, which puts enormous value in the number of incoming links to a page. It turns out that these links also follow a power-law distribution and it not uncommon to find complaints that Google’s Page Rank recognizes popularity over other factors.

So it’s worth wondering: is popularity bad? Are popularity and quality mutually exclusive? Do search rankings represent some sort of global group-think?

Now put this in an academic library context and consider a student Googling for background for a research paper (think University freshmen the night before it’s due). Is it possible that linking patterns work like Wikipedia and tend to favor quality, or do they simply represent lowest common denominator popularity. Do search results reflect the sum of our altruistic linking intentions or our base crudity?

More about search ranking and libraries:

tags: academia, academic library, google, google economy, googling, group think, jakob nielsen, libraries, library, lowest common denominator, networked information, popularity, quality, research, search engines, search rankings, search result rankings, search results, wikipedia

Now Search Lamson Library at A9.com

Casey Bisson — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 12:50:10 +0000

A9, the search engine from Amazon.com, does some pretty interesting things that libraries should be aware of. First, any library considering a metasearch product should look at what can be done for free, and second, libraries should take a look at the OpenSearch technology that drives it.

So now, when searching for Harry Potter, you’ll also find relevant results from Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library. We’re not the first library — I think Seattle Public was — and my work mostly follows the cookbook written up by Ryan Eby, of Michigan State University Libraries. Thanks also go to our university IT sysadmins who installed the XSLT extension for PHP5 earlier this week.

tags: a9, lamson library, metasearch, michigan state university, opensearch, plymouth state university, ryan eby, search engine, search engines, search technology, seattle public library, university, web search, websearch, xslt

Findability, The Google Economy, and Libraries

Casey Bisson — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 02:06:54 +0000

Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, stirred up the web4lib email list with a message about Authority and Findability. His message is about how services like Wikipedia and Google are changing our global information architecture and the meaning of “authority.”

The reaction was quick, and largely critical, but good argument tests our thinking and weeds the gardens of our mind. Argument is good. Here’s my side.

It’s important that we understand how modern search engines work. On the web, each link is a citation, and citation analysis is an important component among the many algorithms used to rank search results. Highly ranked content appears at the top because it is frequently cited (linked). This is obvious to many, but what is harder to fathom is that we (those who publish web content, anyway), not the search engines are responsible for identifying value on the web. Each link is a value statement about the resource we link to.

Think about that in the context of this comment:

Just because a document is findable, this does not mean that its contents are *better* or more truthful than a document that is not findable.

My point is that findability is in fact a measure of value. A perhaps incomplete and indirect measure, but one that has shown a remarkable ability to deliver valuable and useful information on demand.

Unfortunately, not all content is available online, and not all online content is linkable. Sadly, many web OPAC pages are not linkable, as is true of most every A&I and full-text database (or the content is linkable but inaccessible behind an authwall).

So now this quote:

As librarians, we are supposed to be experts on helping people find and retrieve quality information.

And I have to follow this with the following question: How better to help our patrons find high quality, accurate, and authoritative information than to take advantage of the search engines that already answer hundreds of millions of questions each day?

As stewards of knowledge, we need to understand the Google Economy. We need to build applications that embrace it. We need to invest the value that librarians bring to the search for knowledge in our online services.

Feh, libraries are full of people smarter than me. Hopefully they’ll forgive me for speaking out of turn.

tags: authority, citation analysis, findability, google, google economy, libraries, library, library systems, quality data, research methods, search, search engine, search engines, web opac, wikipedia

Must Read: Ambient Findability

Casey Bisson — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 19:19:58 +0000

Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability sold out at Amazon today on the first day of release. There’s a reason: it’s good.

Morville’s work is the most appropriate follow-on to the usability concepts so well promoted by Steven Krug in his Don’t Make Me Think and Jakob Nielsen in Designing Web Usability. Findability, Morville argues, is a necessary component in the success and propagation of an idea or detail or fact. Business and non-profits alike will benefit from understanding the value of findability.

I noted this gem about why non-profits need to pay attention to their search engine placement and web traffic previously, but it’s worth noting again:

At [the National Cancer Institute], the [web development] team had to look beyond the narrow goals of web site design, to see their role in advancing the broader mission of disseminating cancer information to people in need.

The National Cancer Institute, it turns out, was poorly ranked in many relevant searches. Though it may seem obvious now, it doesn’t matter how authoritative their information is, it has no value until it’s found. Nach: findability.

My copy has has notes scribbled in the margin and a bunch of dog-eared pages marking things I need to revisit. No, you can’t borrow it when I’m done with it, go get your own.

tags: ambient, ambient findability, designing web usability, don’t make me think, find, findability, finding, global marketplace, google, google economy, googling, hidden web, jakob nielsen, new books, peter morville, search, search engines, search results, seo, steve krug, steven krug, the effects of findability, the hidden web, the search, top rank, usability, web usability

Ambient Findability And The Google Economy

Casey Bisson — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 12:08:02 +0000

I’m only just getting into Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, but I’m eating it up. In trying to prep the reader to understand his thesis — summed up on the front cover as “what we find changes who we become” — Morville relates his difficulty in finding authoritative, non-marketing information about his daughter’s newly diagnosed peanut allergy:

I can tell you from personal experience that Google does not perform well when it comes to health. [...] Google sent me to specialized sites such as peanutallergy.com, a shallow and grossly commercial web site pushing favored brands of nut free chocolate and soynut butter. Yahoo! and MSN didn’t perform any better. I did eventually find what I needed, but only by drawing on my advanced searching skills and familiarity with authoritive sources like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. If I weren’t a librarian who lives on the Web, I would have failed to find the right answers.

But don’t mistake Morville. He’s not blaming the search engines, and he’s certainly not blaming himself, for failing to find the information he needed. He’s blaming the people and organizations responsible for collecting, gathering, producing, and archiving this information.

A few pages later, he talks about some consulting he did with the National Cancer Institute. It turns out that the organization’s cancer.gov web site got top rank for a search on “cancer,” but fell off the front page when Googling specific cancers like “prostate cancer” or “mesothelioma.” Anybody who understands the Long Tail probably already suspects that searches for “cancer” are hugely outnumbered by the sum of all the searches for specific cancers, and Morville spends considerable time on that. The real question, however, is why did the cancer.gov folks miss this point? The problem is that very few people understand “findability.”

Because, like so many other design teams, they viewed their responsibility from a top-down perspective. Can users find what they need from the home page? It’s an important question, but it ignores the fact that many users don’t start from the home page. Powerful search tools, directories, blogs, social bookmarks, and syndication services are moving deep linking and content sampling from the exception to the rule.

At NCI, the team had to look beyond the narrow goals of web site design, to see their role in advancing the broader mission of disseminating cancer information to people in need.

From where I sit, in a library, that means us too. As stewards of knowledge, it is our responsibility to make sure we catalog it in ways that optimize its availability and findability on the web. That means understanding the Google Economy and taking advantage of it.

If you’ve read this far, you definitely need to go order the book.

tags: ambient findability, find, findability, google, google economy, googling, hidden web, long tail, non-commercial information, peter morville, search, search engines, search results, seo, the hidden web, top rank

UCLA Takes On Google Scholar

Casey Bisson — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 11:54:29 +0000

Via Jay Bhatt at LISNews: UCLA Libraries‘ discussion of Google Scholar, Search Engines, Databases, and the Research Process.

tags: google scholar, googlescholar, libraries, library, research, research database, research databases, search, search engines, sevia, ucla libraries

The Google Economy — The Wikipedia Entry

Casey Bisson — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 11:13:21 +0000

I’m rather passionate about the Google Economy, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to learn that I just wrote about it in my first ever Wikipedia entry.

Here it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_economy

“Google Economy” identifies the concept that the value of a resource can be determined by the way that resource is linked to other resources. It is more complex than search ranking, and broader than interlinked web pages, though it draws meaning from both.

The Internet and World Wide Web have emphasized the role of the citation as a means of identifying the value of a resource. The structure of the print publishing world imposes strict limits on what information is promoted and distributed, but the web imposes much lower barriers to ‘publication,’ eliminating the old-media filters that information consumers once depended on to identify worthy information. Internet Search engines were developed to help navigate the growing number of web pages, but their results could not represent the value of individual pages until Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin started to apply the concept of citation analysis that was developed in the 1950s by Dr. Eugene Garfield at the University of Pennsylvania. Today, Google’s PageRank weighs heavily on citation analysis among the more than 150 criteria evaluated.

The result is that the PageRank of any single web page is highly dependent on the number of web pages that link to it (and their PageRank). The highest ranked pages appear at the top of the search results page. The financial implication for commercial web sites are obvious (and often exploited), but there are serious implications for non-commercial content as well. A person doing any research on the web will find his or her results heavily influenced by PageRank-style ranking. Accurate and correct information that is poorly linked will have lower ranking than incorrect or misleading information that is better linked. Because many of the most authoritative information sources — examples: medical journals, the Oxford English Dictionary — are subscription services, their content is not available for indexing by search engines, and by extension, to those using search engines for research.

Even among free services — many library catalogs, for instance — it can be difficult to index the information because of technical obstacles like dynamic URLs that make it difficult to deep link to content or explicit prohibitions in the robots.txt. The result is that a person searching for a book is far more likely to find the Amazon.com catalog page or blog posts discussing the book long before they will find any library offering the book for loan.
As with market economies, the Google Economy is subject to uncertainties, fluctuation, and occasional manipulation. Manipulators do so, however, at serious risk, as search engines have been known to blacklist them from results pages. Further, search engine engineers continue to refine ranking criteria to deliver quality search results. In general, however, there are three rules for full participation in the Google Economy:

Linking must be possible
Linking must be desirable
Linking must be measurable

External links

Roger Sperberg on the value of availability and permanence on the web
David Rothman on hate sites and the Google Economy
Casey Bisson on politics and the Google Economy, one of a number of his posts about the Google Economy
Bernard Moon reports on the Google Economy from BlogBusinessSummit 2005
Joe Griffin on marketing a web site in the Google Economy

tags: citation analysis, dr. eugene garfield, eugene garfield, google, google economy, information consumers, larry page, link, linking, links, media filters, print publishing, search, search engines, sergey brin, value, web pages, wikipedia, world wide web

The Google Economy

Casey Bisson — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 04:23:49 +0000

I’ve been talking about it a lot lately, most recently in a comment at LibDev.

In the old world, information companies could create value by limiting access to their content. Most of us have so internalized this scarcity = value theory that we do little more than grumble about the New York Times’ authwall or similar limitations to the free-flow and linking of information.

Jenny Levine wrote recently about OCLC/LJ’s short-run (though not yet ended) experiment with authwalls. Jenny concludes that the move might have sold an extra subscription here or there, but completely killed the online linking that made LJ’s articles so authoritative in search engines.

Roger at Electric Forest struck to the heart of this recently:

…keep the [information] under heavy protection and you will find that people ignore this sheltered content in favor of the sources that embrace the web and make everything accessible… [Open and accessible resources] will become the influential authorities, not because they are more trustworthy, or more authoritative, or better written, but because they are more accessible.

In this new world, value is measured by search engine rankings, which are largely a measure of the number of links pointing to a resource. Because it’s impossible to link to things behind authwalls, or to material that isn’t online at all, Google et all have turned that scarcity = value equation on its head.

Today, in order to be relevant…in order to gain value, material must be available, linkable, indexable, and usable. Over the long haul, the best way to increase your Page Rank is to create outstanding content and make it freely available to everyone.

This is (part of) what got Zach blogging and it’s exactly what make’s Google’s non-hierarchical world work. Soon to be very related: social bookmarking as made famous by del.icio.us, now Yahoo! feature.

tags: accessibility, accessible resources, authoritative, electric forest, google, google economy, information, jenny levine, new york times, oclc, scarcity, scarcity = value, search engines, the shifted librarian, value, value equation, value theory