Google and User Happiness

I was interested in the presentation Daniel Russell made at Mt. Zion's H.M. Fishbon Memorial Library in November, 2008 because he's Google's main man in charge of "user happiness." Also because Google is the 800 pound gorilla in the information jungle, where librarians sometimes feel like an endangered species.

Yesterday I gave a PubMed coaching session to a physician who Googles using natural language queries to find journal articles on specific clinical topics. Most of the time he considers his searching successful; that is, he can find one or two good articles. That's all he wants anyway. His only complaint is that he can't always get full text; hence his request for a PubMed coaching session from yours truly.

I start with the unhappy news that PubMed includes links to free full text only when provided by open access publishers. Most publishers want to be paid for their content, so libraries spend millions of dollars providing that content to their affiliated users, something most people don't recognize or understand. I end with some good news/bad news: open access publishing may some day replace the existing subscription-based scholarly publishing model. But probably not in our lifetime.

Then I give my spiel about how using PubMed's controlled vocabulary MeSH (medical subject headings) can increase precision and recall and is especially useful for very complex searches or very exhaustive ones, such as when you're designing a research project and absolutely, positively have to know everything that's been published in your area of research. I could tell he wasn't buying it. Too much work for too little return. He was perfectly fine with his established system of Googling. The truth is that not everyone wants or needs to be a PubMed virtuoso. But if you'd like to add to your PubMed searching repertoire, please give me a call, 206-6639. It's free...except for your time, that is.