Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

Prompted by the Google movie, I've been thinking about why Google is vital to me, as a librarian who is heavily invested in intelligent searching (both on and off the public web). And I realised I use Google as a glorified bookmarks file. If I use a resource so often that I want to get to it in four keystrokes (which is why I find tagging useless as a bookmarks replacement -- I can reach anything in four keystrokes) then I bookmark it. But what if there's a ton of tools out there which do, say, currency conversion? I only need to do that occasionally, and I don't care which currency calculator I get. So I Google, and take the first one unless red flags gets set off by the link. Same for web color chart mappings, or lists of HTML elements. I know I can find those easily with Google as my bookmarks file. But if I want a good definition, I go to m-w.com, and if I want a more specific type of definition (jargony / more complete / etymylogical / etc) I'll go to one of the many other sites I have bookmarked (OED, Webster's unabridged, etc). I won't go to Google for something where I know precisely who'll have the best answer.

Tags, I suppose, are halfway between Google and a good bookmarks file, which might explain why I don't use them much (I tag my own lj posts, but I don't do social bookmarking). They still require effort to create and maintain a coherent system, like bookmarks, and they require multiple keystrokes to access, like search engines. For me the main value of social bookmarking is the "social" not the "bookmarking". If I felt like organizing something in order to share it with the world, I would find very useful. At least one feed in my personal RSS aggregator is a del.icio.us feed which updates when new entries are tagged.

But for my personal use, its search engines or bookmarks files. Even when I search, I don't tend to search for my final goal -- I usually search for a good resource which is likely to have information about my final goal.