The Google Effect
Posted by: Rebecca Vnuk
A lot of ink has been spilled recently over the growing power of Google. The current New Yorker has an article discussing the question of whether Google is getting too big. Last week a New York Times article on the Google Books settlement referred to Google as “the 800-pound gorilla of digital 
information”; today, there’s an op- ed from Google co-founder Sergei Brin touting the benefits of Google Books.
However Google Books changes libraries, it has changed reference in ways that have nothing to do with digitized collections. It has transformed user expectations, and I’m hearing more reference database publishers talk about making their search more like Google. This doesn’t mean sitting back and letting the algorithm do all the work. Earlier this week, in the course of a demo of the new SIRS Issues Researcher platform, I talked with Barb Beach and Rene Terry at ProQuest about just that. The challenge was to make the database look and feel familiar to students who use Google everyday, but is more controlled behind the scenes.
