Google, Matt Cutts and the Librarians

There’s a new online forum for librarians over at Google Groups. The group is publishing a monthly newsletter and everybody’s favorite Google software engineer, Matt Cutts, is contributing to it. Why?

Librarians increasingly turn to Google for answers, and Google endeavors to create a search engine that can do the same things a great librarian does. Librarians are dedicated to gathering and cataloging information and retrieving it when needed. They want to find the best, most relevant answer for any given question. They are THE human research whizzes.

Google, too, is dedicated to gathering (spidering) and cataloguing (indexing) information, so that it can be retrieved on demand. Like librarians, it also strives to present the most relevant answer (search result) to every question (search query). It looks like Google and the Librarians are a match made in heaven.

In the first issue of the group’s newsletter, Matt addresses what is, perhaps, the question most often asked of Google "How does Google decide what result goes at the top of the list?" In his answer, Matt gives a clear, non-technical explanation of how Google works. It’s recommended reading for anyone who may have lost their view of the forest by focusing for too long on the individual trees.  It’s also a great explanation of how search engines, in general, work.

The second issue of the newsletter discusses “Trust Rank”. Matt Cutts approaches the topic from Google’s point of view – how the algorithm determines which websites to trust. Karen G. Schneider, Director of the Librarians’ Internet Index, talks about how a librarian judges which sites are “trustworthy”.  You will find an amazing correlation between the two.  In my opinion, if Google were using humans to determine “Trust Rank”, they’d do it just as Karen Schneider describes. Anyone who wants to improve their website’s trustworthiness in the eyes of both search engines and human visitors is wise to heed her advice.

As stated on the introduction page of Google’s Newsletter for Librarians, “Librarians and Google share the same mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”  The meeting of the minds of these two groups is certain to be informative and interesting. To subscribe to the newsletter, visit www.google.com/services/librarian_center.html.

 

Mary Bowling - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc. 

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