Monday, November 29, 2004
Trying to beat Google
According to Chris Batt, chief executive of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, the MLA's Knowledge Web initiative will be able to deliver to Internet users a high quality service of trusted information sources that Google - or anyone else - cannot. Batt predicts that Google will die, and seems uninterested in learning from the experiences in this area of organisations such as the BBC.
Is this the right way to spend public money? And if the BBC, employing the best people in the field, found the task too challenging, does the MLA stand a hope of achieving its stated aim? Perhaps they would be better off making sure their websites come out first on the Google listing, which rarely happens at present.
Betts's comments were made as part of IPPR's Manifesto for a Digital Britain. You can follow Manifesto programme developments, on the Digital Manifesto blog, where there are also links to a range of related documents.
11:33 AM|
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2 Comments:
Louise, I happened to bump into someone from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council yesterday and asked him about this. I got the feeling he thought Chris Batt had not meant to give quite this impression. Rather than aiming to compete with Google, I understood that Knowledge Web might be looking to collaborate with them (and other search engines) to provide some sort of quality kitemarking for cultural and learning resources. I guess this would help users sort 'pure' information resources from more commercial ones.
I broadly agree with your reservations about publicly-funded search engines, but the Graf review of BBC Online cautiously endorsed the idea of the BBC retaining and developing its search engine.
Chris didn't mention collaboration at all (and saying "Google will die" strikes me as fairly competitive, not collaborative), though I completely agree that this would be the most sensible approach.
I don't have a problem with publicly-funded search engines: my issue is with people who say they want to reinvent the wheel. The BBC hired the brightest and the best, and spent a lot of money, with the ambition of 'doing it better'. What they have is a very good product, but they say themselves they spent a lot of money to not very great effect. What concerns me is that MLA (or Chris) doesn't seem very interested in listening and learning from the BBC when the Beeb tries to offer valuable advice from experience. The message from the Beeb was sort out your metadata before throwing away vast sums, a sentiment I entirely agree with, but which Chris didn't seem to want to hear.
Metadata is a real weak point in the public sector. While Chris complains that museums don't rank high on search engine results, this is a metadata problem, and does not in itself justify major expenditure on DIY search engines.
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