Vaidhyanathan states; “If Google is the dominant way we navigate the Internet, and thus the primary lens through which we experience both the local and the global, then it has remarkable power to set agendas and alter perceptions. Its biases are built into algorithms. And those biases affect how we value things, perceive things, and navigate the worlds of culture and ideas (pg.7).” His fundamental idea is that we should work to regulate search systems like Google to take responsibility for how the Web delivers knowledge to us, the general public.
His reflection on the examination of Google Scholar is that the product ranks different articles based on the citations they receive. When searching on Google Scholar we are given results from across all the disciplines. This tool brings the titles of academic research to the public knowledge but the service is said to be flawed. Because, “according to academic librarians, Google Scholar has been constructed with Google’s usual high level of opacity and without serious consideration of the needs and opinions of scholars” (pg.192). While it may be true that many of the search features of ‘academic’ search engines are lacking, Vaidhyanathan misses the importance of design: do present modes of academic search meet his objective of a system that allows for the easy acquisition of knowledge?
Thus, like old times this makes the need for librarians important. We can trust librarians because of their philosophy of protecting users and information. Librarians have always been a trusted source of knowledge filtering and the university libraries still have a stronghold of knowledge accumulation and storage.
Google’s mass digitization of books (i.e. Google Books), and Google’s rising influence in higher education is alarming. Trusting Google with such important material, like all our academic heritage, is going a bit too far.
Re: Librarians
I agree with you: librarians are important and should be respected.
The issue with Google is that it presents information, but, because it encourages people not to use or even develop information literacy skills, many can’t process the information it provides, which is where librarians would be able to step in, but many won’t ask them.
We have to encourage people to go to librarians and learn the research lit. skills necessary to navigate Google.
I wonder if anyone else has any thoughts about how the citation-based ordering structure would impact Google over time. Could it be beneficial to sort items in this way when all of the items listed are from many years ago and the citations are also from many years ago? In this way, it seems useful. It’s an algorithm that e-mimics the preferences of the academy. I think that’s the goal. I think that perhaps it’s not a terrible starting place, but how will existing citations continue to exert an influence when they are no longer needed? For example, any scientific argument that has since been disproven or updated would still get preferential treatment over it’s successor. And couldn’t that potentially lead to researchers using outdated information for far longer than necessary?