Beyond Google

Citation

"The good news is that everything is on the internet. The bad news is that everything is on the internet."

R. Wachbroit, University of Maryland

It is indisputable that the internet has become the main source of information in every sense and that the web provides us with increasingly wide access to a vast amount of information, in a way that we never had available before. Besides this, search engines such as Google have made searching for information on the web so very much easier and have made an exceptional contribution to its popularisation.

However, the generalised and intensive use of the internet, together with many other digital resources that are accessible from the web, has highlighted a number of problems, among others, from the point of view of the suitability or reliability of the information, as well as its ethical use.

As Robert Wachbroit's quote at the beginning of this section warns, there is a huge, huge amount of information on the internet, but with varying degrees of value. Accredited, high-ranking, supremely relevant scientific documents co-exist with pseudo-teaching and poorly regulated documents that have very little or no information value. This is why it is essential to push "beyond Google" and reach all the information that is invisible to general search engines. We need to remember, for example, that although it is true that the internet gives us free access to vast amounts of documentation, it is also true to say that a large part of the most valuable scientific information is still not free to access and we have to pay to do so. This is the case, for example, of scientific journals, which are essential if we are to keep up to speed with advances in the different fields of knowledge.

However, apart from the problem we have when accessing certain information that is not free to access, often the most valuable, we come up against the problem of "documentary noise", i.e., the amount of documents or registers retrieved during a search that are not relevant to the search topic, which normally occurs when a generic mass search or a not so accurate search is made using a general search engine. Therefore, we must also have the ability to know how to select and assess the most interesting information for each specific need.

 

Finally, as well as accessing, selecting and assessing the information, another important point we also need to bear in mind is the ability to organise and communicate it correctly, and use it in an ethical and legal manner.

 © Fundació per a la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya