Google Launches Newsletter for Librarians

-- Library Journal, 01/06/2006

Google has produced the first issue of the company's Newsletter for Librarians, aiming to answer one of the most frequent questions the company gets from librarians: How does Google index the web, and, more important, how does it rank the results? Quality engineer Matt Cutts explains that Google first crawls the web, then builds an index, then must rank documents and determine relevancy. For example, "If two pages appear to have roughly the same amount of information matching a given query, we'll usually try to pick the page that more trusted web sites have chosen to link to. Still, we'll often elevate a page with fewer links or lower PageRank if other signals suggest that the page is more relevant. For example, a web page dedicated entirely to the civil war is often more useful than an article that mentions the civil war in passing, even if the article is part of a reputable site such as Time.com."

The newsletter, aimed to be issued quarterly, was conceived at the 2005 ALA conference in Chicago. Google asserts "Librarians and Google share the same mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. The goal of this newsletter is to highlight ways we can work together to fulfill that mission for patrons, students and users." While librarians may share many of the same goals with Google, the latter is a for-profit company, and, for example, it has not provided library links to scans of current books.