VALISblog

Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

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Sunday, April 20, 2003
Reasons why information professionals are a good thing, number 11340 of an occasional series...  
 
There's nothing like reading your referral logs to make you realise that not everyone has quite as good a grasp of internet search technologies as they think they do. And that Google and all its little algorithms still isn't half as good at finding something as a couple of cunning librarians. Reason I'm inspired to write this? My *other* blog is turning up in the top few results of various Google searches, for things which have very little to do with it.

For example: "soccer scors." - nice try - helps if you spell your search term correctly, though (SCORS is an acronym mentioned on my site, is why it turned up my blog).

Example again: male photography of soccer players in the UK. I mean, what? This is wrong on so many levels. Think about it - there's no UK soccer team, or league, so no-one's going to use UK to refer to any site about English soccer or Scottish soccer. Second, the English, Scots, etc call it football, not soccer. Third, 99% of any references to soccer are going to be to the male game anyway, so that's superfluous. Fourth, no-one's going to be using the word photography - photos or photographs maybe. Or indeed photo*. Truncation is a wonderful thing. Rant over, it's 1am here.


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