Schmidt

In a 2009 interview with Wired magazine, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said: “…do you think search is a solved problem? … we do not. We think there are many, many things that can be done to improve search. Would you like to be able to say to Google, ‘What should I do tomorrow?’ or ‘Where are my car keys?’ We’re just at the beginning of answering the really hard questions. We’re good now at cataloguing, indexing stuff that’s already been written. But what about meaning, what about understanding real intent? These are very, very hard problems, and search is the way to access those.”

Librarians tend to see Google as a threat, a rival, a menace, a danger. Only rarely do we appreciate Google’s successes in information retrieval, and many goals we share with the company. Google is the most successful cataloguing organization in history. Attempts to play off Google against librarians (see this reductionist polemic by Phil Bradley) are a mug’s game. Many say that Google makes finding information too easy. That sounds like the textile workers who complained that spinning frames and power looms produced cloth too quickly. History has not looked kindly on the Luddites.

The interview had scarcely begun when Schmidt  upbraided the journalist as though he were speaking to Bradley: “You’re putting the questions into a negative context rather than looking at it from the standpoint of innovation and growth – which is how we think. Your questions imply an industrial model and a limited model, but that’s not in fact how the world works. And Google is about taking advantage of this enormous opportunity.”

AltaVista

The search engine AltaVista was switched off today – the site now redirects to Yahoo, its owner since 2003. For those of us who began to use the internet in the late 1990s, this marks a sad moment, tinged with irony. The attempt to mimic Yahoo by converting a dependable search interface into a portal for shopping and free email is what started AltaVista on its protracted journey to the internet graveyard.

AltaVista’s program for locating and categorizing websites found more webpages than were were believed to exist at its founding in 1995. But the search box also relied on an efficient index accessed on extensive hardware. AltaVista was the first searchable full-text database of a significant part of the Web.

It abandoned streamlined search in 1999. A year previously two PhD students at Stanford had the idea that reliable, dedicated search could, on its own, provide a Trojan Horse to monetizable web services. So the established AltaVista lost out to the upstart Google because it gave up doing what it was good at to enter a market it had no expertise in. I think there’s a lesson for librarians there.