CIO, the companion website to CIO magazine, talked to me a few weeks ago about what people who only know how to search Google are missing out on, especially in a business/market research fashion. Here’s the article: Six Techniques to Get More from the Web than Google Will Tell You.
I don’t talk about it much lately, but when I was fresh out of library school I did some work doing market research and other miscellaneous stuff for a recruiter who worked a lot for Amazon.com and it was fascinating to look at the questions she’d ask to try to help them find the right person for the job. I had a sort of sideways approach to some of the topics we researched and that seemed to help her find good people. I like getting to talk to people about the importance of primary source material and the difference between going to a library’s list of good links on their website and talking to the librarian (in person or over IM) directly. I have mixed experiences talking to reporters but I was really happy with how Margaret Locher, an MLS holder herself, represented the things that Ann Cullen from Simmons and I told her.
Yes, it’s a good article, though I’d question the point “If a URL ends in .edu, .gov or .org, you can bet the information you’ll find there is primary. Primary sources are more authoritative than secondary sources” Clearly .org sites are nothing of the kind. Students may also have an .edu account, and I wouldn’t call their work ‘authoritative’ either. Also, if you’re going to include .edu it makes sense to include .ac as well, since that’s more widely used (unless you’re looking at a purely US perspective of course).
I was also surprised to see that Pinakes wasn’t mentioned, which provides as good quality data as the WWW Vlib, and the Librarians’ Internet Index was also missing in action.