What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog • Hacker News Board

Re: What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

#111

Post by vidarh » Sat, Jul 15, 2017, 7:05 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #110

vidarh wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a lot of us there was a period where it felt like Google was inferior because while it was good, if you understood your space and knew which terms to carefully include/exclude in the search using search operators with Altavista for example, you'd be likely to get a better result. For a while. But that was based on a web where the amount of information was "small" and of searching within small bubbles we knew well,…

I used altavista from when it was altavista.digital.com. The only time I remember it being better than Google was when Google only spidered the Stanford domain, and slightly later if you knew the page title you were looking for. Also if you wanted Usenet search before DejaNews.

Note that I didn't write that it was better in general. It was briefly better for the subset of users that knew exactly what to search for in their specific niches, until e.g. people got used to SEO and the like.

If you knew from past experience and searches that most people used term X when they wrote about Y, Altavista gave you more precise tools to narrow your search.

The whole point being that a subset of users were blinded by our in depth experience with Altavista into not seeing the advantages of Google as early on - we knew exactly how to work around the limitations.

The problem for Altavista, and advantage for Google, is that this doesn't scale. It takes a lot of effort to expand this to learning how to search in any new subject, and that effort grows dramatically as the amount of indexed pages increases and it becomes harder to find terms that act as good filters. It was only viable for a short period of time when the web was small and most people didn't think about SEO, and as long as we were still conditioned to treat a search engine as something you used for things you couldn't e.g. find in a directory.

Re: What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

#112

Post by alexvoda » Sat, Jul 15, 2017, 9:50 PM UTC

pluma wrote: post #92

nl wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so true. On HN a few months ago I came across someone claiming that web search was fine before Google and the only reason Google got popular was superior marketing. I found that so completely shocking to me that someone didn't remember how bad it was. Then I realised that was nearly 20 years ago, and it was really only 7 years or so when search was bad. I'd never felt so old before.

I can't be the only person to remember using search aggregators (aka "meta search engines") because every individual search engine was so bad and incomplete on its own, especially outside the US. The "major" search engines before Google were Yahoo and Altavista, who were too busy trying to sell you a foggy concept of being "the Internet's start page" to be of any practical use when you actually wanted to find somethi…

I remember using Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, Excite, DogPile, and a few others. I also used some meta search engines but I can't remember them.

But I do remember using Copernic.It was a meta search engine application. You had to install this one.

Re: What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

#113

Post by norea-armozel » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 1:43 PM UTC

moftz wrote: post #12

norea-armozel wrote: post #2

I think the problem I have with modern election search is that often presented with what I don't want and I have to craft my query to get a decent list of sources. Mind you, this was way back in 2009 at Wichita State but the experience always seem to come up even when I use Google Scholar or equivalent modern search indices. They always seem to be off in terms of accuracy and relevance on the searches (especially now…

But going back to a card catalog system, you can really only search in ways that someone else has created. You can't search by words within an article, you can't search using regular expressions (or at least some boolean operators), and you can only find things as fast as you can thumb through a stack of cards. At least with a search engine, if I type in a query that isn't going to find me what I'm actually looking f…

I don't think my comment implies we ditch digital search indexes. I just think Google as a replacement for properly curated search indexes is the problem here. For general web site searches Google is great but if you're looking for a particular topic it often comes up with sites that aren't even relevant (again my shortwave listening hobby is a great example of this problem). It's pretty hard to work just Google alone when you need a solid base to work from in terms of sites and documents for niche topics. It's why I tend to go back to books for my niche interests. You can't expect Google to handle every possible case because it won't do its primary well.

Re: What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

#114

Post by titzer » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 8:52 PM UTC

cableshaft wrote: post #104

titzer wrote: post #97

Well, karma be damned. Libraries would be the _one_ chance that humanity would have to reboot from a dark age. Imagine the power went out. For a month. Or a year. E.g. we are very vulnerable to a massive solar flare like the Carrington event in 1859 ( http://gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-a-massive-solar-stor... ), which could knock out power for months or years at a time. We'd need a way to maintain society withou…

You know the fun thing about computers and digitization? You can write software to export its data in a way that can be reprinted onto physical paper. I'm not sure if libraries do that, and I'm sure they wouldn't reprint each and every line on separate cards and store them in massive tombs still, but in theory they could have a hardcopy in a few massive binders somewhere. Of course it'll be out of date the instant it…

You're right. I hope they've done this and that it is kept on site somewhere.