The search bar replaced the reference desk without replacing the skills behind it. – Hana Lee Goldin
When I was in library school in the early ’90s, the internet was very young and largely accessed by libraries, universities, and research corporations via several companies such as Dialog which charged by the minute for access. Because of this, it was considered important for librarians to learn how to formulate effective Boolean searches which would return roughly half a dozen good, solid articles on the topic. It was recognized that a search delivering dozens or hundreds of results was a poor one because it would take too much (expensive) time and (professional) effort to sift through all that to find what one was actually looking for. And I was really good at it; I excelled at crafting “Goldilocks” searches which would return a manageable number of relevant articles, neither too many nor too few, usually on the first try. Then two things happened: AOL started offering unlimited connection time, and Google came up with its non-Boolean search engine which delighted non-librarians by returning thousands of items in the pretense that more is better. And so an entire generation of people has grown up with absolutely no idea how to craft an effective search, leaving them helpless in the face of Google’s rapid enshittification, and therefore easy prey for its predatory and typically-wrong chatbot. As Google has rapidly decayed I’ve tried several other search engines, but none of them are remotely as good as classic Google was.
That’s why I was so excited to discover this article by reference librarian Hana Lee Goldin, explaining not only how to get around Google’s loathsome practice of dishing up swill instead of what you ordered, but also how to use Boolean operators which have apparently always been hidden in the system. Goldin explains the reason for her article concisely:
Google…constantly…swaps in synonyms, personalizes results based on your history, and decides what you probably meant rather than returning what you typed. Most of the time that interpretation is invisible. These tools are how you override it.
Beyond that, I’m not going to quote her excellent article because you should read it all. The link above is to her Substack blog, but to head off the possibility of link rot I’ve also backed it up. And if Hana happens to read this: from a retired reference librarian, thank you!
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