…many folks listen. Gary is the Editor of Resourceshelf and a strong voice in cutting edge librarian/geek culture. In this piece, guest written for Pandia.com, Gary lists his top ten grips about Google. Many of them run along a theme which might best be summed up as failures to nurture the open, geek culture from which Google sprang.
Highlights:
1) Google needs to fix several advanced search problems. Many of them have been known for several months. These are things that should work….
2) Google’s page estimates haven’t been close to accurate for many months. I’ve been told that they’re, “just estimates.” However, can’t estimates be more accurate?
4) The company should clearly state that they don’t show all backlinks when running a link: search.
9) In late August IEEE announced that Google was crawling abstracts of their publication database. According to the news release, the project was to be completed by September. That was five months ago and a very small percentage of IEEE material appears in Google. What happened?
10) In 2001 Google spokesperson David Krane told News.Com, “…we’ve firmly established ourselves as the No. 1 search service on the Internet, and this can be attributed to our laser-like focus on a search-only business model.” It’s obvious that this business model is gone.
His conclusion:
The company now has many constituencies to please and will have even more once they go public. Is Google doing what AltaVista, Excite, and so many others did by trying to become all things to all people?
I find the page estimate thing quite interesting, as I want to find all pages. I noticed that in most search engines the page estimates are wrong. Why are these estimates by the way? I assume they can count the number of pages in their index?
Some search engines even limit the number of results you can view (far belows their estimate), but you are able to edit the URL in order to get to other pages. What happens here?