Last night’s evening session was called “Google-brary: The Status Quo of Tomorrow’s MEGALIBRARY.” It was a Google love/hate fest. Some librarians in the audience seemed to feel Google is helping people with access to information, while other librarians were concerned about the monopolization of information. However, it was also pointed out that Google is not the only player in this area and that Amazon and the Open Content Alliance are also in the mix. But the biggest gaping hole was that the Internet Archive wasn’t discussed. Brewster Kahle and his organization are the real pioneers in this space and although the big companies are stepping in now and are getting the limelight, none of this would be possible without IA. (See my review from last November about the Wayback Machine.)

Adam Smith, the Google Product Manager on the panel, did a fine job I thought. It’s not easy being in front of many hundred librarians. He obviously takes issues around digitization seriously, though he also kept to the company line about wanting “to do what’s right". I think they’d be better not repeating these types of statements all the time. It’s starting to feel a bit forced. But in any case, I think it’s great that he agreed to be on the panel. Too bad Amazon and the Open Content Alliance didn’t also have panelists. Too bad Brewster Kahle wasn’t a panelist!

Some news that was announced last night was that Microsoft has agreed to join the Open Content Alliance along with the Internet Archive, Yahoo! and other organizations. According to the information I learned last night, Microsoft is going to pay for the digitization of 150,000 books.

Some random good quotes from the panel:
* The most requested interlibrary loan book last year was the Da Vinci Code. Would it just be cheaper for libraries to buy a used copy from Amazon and send it to a patron than do ILL?
* In the future, Internet Librarian will simply called the Librarian Conference.

Karen Schneider, who writes Free Range Librarian and who also runs the venerable Librarian’s Internet Index (note new name) gave a talk about blogging ethics. Although the Search Lounge is about search, and I don’t want to make it a blog about blogs, I did want to mention some things she said on this topic.

New terms (to me this first one was new, but a quick search on Yahoo returns many matches, including this news.com article from February, 2005):
Astroturf: a blog that looks like a personal blog, but is really sponsored by a corporation. I often wonder, for instance, about blogs I see dedicated to 1970s TV shows. The term can also be applied to political groups who start fake grassroots blogs.

biblioblogosphere - the world of librarian blogs.

Good quote:
“There is nothing more pathetic than a librarian who gets the facts wrong.”
The context for this quote was her adamant insistence that we as librarians fact-check everything we publish.

Another good point she made was about transparency and how important it is to provide “About Me” sections. I totally agree. It doesn’t have to be an extensive bio, but at least provide a brief paragraph so that I can at least think I’m reading a real person’s writing and not astroturf or a splog.

Mary Ellen Bates, gave a talk called “30 Search Tips in 40 Minutes.” I attended the same talk last year and I highly recommend her talks. As well as sharing cool new sites she focuses on usefulness. Some highlights:

*She mentioned Exalead as having some of the best advanced search syntax capabilities for web searching, including phonetic and approximate spelling. (See my review of Exalead from last November.
*http://www.housingmaps.com/ - maps Craigslist real estate listings to Google Maps so you can see on a map where the listings are located.
*She mentioned, by my count, 11 different Yahoo! products and services, such as Y!Q, podcasts.yahoo.com, Konfabulator, MyWeb, Yahoo! Search Subscriptions, Site Explorer, and more.
*Amazon’s Statistically Improbably Phrases - a data mining feature for searching books that shows which phrases in a book are “statistically improbable”. These phrases provide more unique index terms and then let users find other books with the same terms.

Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, gave the keynote address this morning: “Shifting Worlds: Internet Librarians at the Forefront”. He discussed the latest findings from the project, just as he did at last year’s conference. Some highlights that I found interesting:

For the United States…

* Half of U.S. internet users are now using broadband regularly.
* 2/3 of users have access to broadband even if it’s not their regular method of connecting.
* 20% of Americans have never been online.
* People who are using dial-up today are less likely to switch and upgrade to broadband than in previous years.
* Chat room usage is declining heavily due to other communication technologies like blogs, social networking sites, and instant messenger.

For American teenagers, age 12 – 17…

*They will engage online advertisements if they think they’re relevant (whereas adults are more likely to be turned off by ads).
*19% of teenagers have started their own blog.
*Multi-tasking! It’s all about multi-tasking, including email, the web, cell phones and instant messaging. All at once.

I’m in Monterey, California attending this year’s Internet Librarian conference with 1100 other attendees. Dispatches to follow…

UPDATE: Sold for $101,100! I checked earlier today and the highest bid was around $41,000, but apparently there was a last day surge.

Follow the hot action as jux2.com is up for auction on eBay.

The current high bid is $25,100.

You get the following:

* The software code running the jux2 meta-search web site

* Written instructions on how to maintain and add to the code

* The graphic files for updating the UI (including a design for adding a fourth search engine)

* The legal rights to the jux2 brand name

* Ownership of the www.jux2.com URL

The Q & A is probably the most interesting part. It discusses technical support for the buyer (some, but limited), number of searches per day (normally around 10k), and the fact that it currently has no revenue because it doesn’t display sponsored results.

UPDATE: With just under a day left to go, the price is now $28,200.

I tore through John Battelle’s The Search. He’s my favorite writer about the search industry, so I was anxious to read the book. It did not disappoint!

It’s a must-read for people who work for search engines. For those who don’t, just read the first chapter, “The Database of Intentions.” The chapter explains his theory, which he’s discussed many times on Searchblog, about the potential wealth of information that search engines know about individuals and society in general. He loves his clickstreams.

The book on the whole is a mixture of Battelle’s ideas, the history of search, the search business, search technology, and the future of search. I like how he weaves in personal stories about people like Louis Monier, Bill Gross, and other luminaries into the larger narrative of search. I enjoyed reading about how Yahoo fits into the overall picture. There were so many mentions of Yahoo throughout the entire book, that I’m not sure why the company wasn’t called out in the title, such as: Search, How Google, Yahoo, and Their Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.

One of the biggest things I took away from the book was how transitive search engine dominance can be. Think about AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, HotBot, and all the others who held the top spot, or were near the top, who have since gone into exile or been purchased and devoured by larger companies. A great quote about this is on page 63: “At the center of the web was Netscape.” Netscape? I can hardly even remember the days of Netscape being at the center of the web.

I have a few nitpicky comments, but really they’re just small issues. But here goes:

— On page 2 is a discussion about Google’s Zeitgiest, but what about Lycos 50 and Yahoo Buzz? The Lycos 50 dates back to 1999, and Yahoo Buzz dates back to 2000, or at least that’s the oldest reference on the Wayback Machine. Not a big deal, but I think these both should have been mentioned.

— WebFountain has a section devoted to it, beginning on page 267, but I remember this project as Clever. Yet I don’t see Clever mentioned anywhere. Is it just a project name change or are they actually different projects with the same people, both of which study hubs and authorities? I had the opportunity of visiting these guys in the spring of 1999 and I enjoyed Battelle’s description of driving up to the fortress-like Almaden complex through the lush, grassy hills.

— On page 165, in the discussion about the online shoe store, owner Neil Moncrief is quoted as saying, “We hung in there, cleaned up the site a bit…” This is a pretty big statement to gloss over like that. Cleaning up the site a bit could mean removing spam-like attributes that caused his site to be demoted in Google’s results. I wonder what exactly he changed in order for his site to rise again in Google’s results. I don’t think it was anything purposeful on his part, but still was there something that he’d done on his site that he didn’t realize would have a negative impact?

— On page 167 Battelle describes an advertising scenario about a man whose wife is pregnant. His TV and computer usage becomes target fodder for advertisers. In other words, because he’s interested in baby topics, retailers are able to target baby products to him. Like in paid search. I don’t think the scenario presented is too far from reality, but I also don’t think it’s compelling. I look forward to having my TV and computer integrated, but not for the purpose of finding products. I want convergence for information reasons. I want to be watching a movie on TV and be able to click immediately to a cast listing so I can find out who that familiar looking character actor is.

— On page 252, he writes, “In short, the search engine of the future isn’t really a search engine as we know it. It’s more like an intelligent agent – or as Larry Page told me, a reference librarian with complete mastery of the entire corpus of human knowledge.” Yes, yes yes, like the Librarian of Congress avatar in Snow Crash.

— On page 253 is this quote: “Either you scan it in, or you lose it to the moldering embrace of analog obscurity.” And yet, I look more at old printed photographs than I do at old videotapes. I don’t lose old photographs. In fact I keep them in albums or boxes and I don’t have to plug in an electronic device to them. Anyhow, my point here is just that archiving digital media is very tricky because it requires compatible devices.

— Where’s LookSmart? Although the company had some major issues, it was still an early player in directories, community, paid listings and paid inclusion. I was surprised not to see it mentioned anywhere in the book. I understand that not all search companies can be mentioned, but the book even discusses MSN using Inktomi, but skips over LookSmart’s directory also being used.

But like I said, these are small points. Overall it’s a great read.