To Search or to Research?

via Librarian of the Internet by findingDulcinea Staff on 28 May

The term "search" has taken on a different kind of life in recent years, thanks to our companion, the World Wide Web. While so many of us want to believe that Google is not a verb, we all know better. It's too easy; all you have to do is submit a query into the little box in and the world of information is opened up—it's instant gratification at its finest! But, does instant gratification come with a price? In the context of searching on the WWW, it certainly does.

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Hazel's comment:
I was going to profusely apologise for the irregularity of posting here which resulted in this not being brought to your attention for a whole month. Gasp! Shock, horror!
But then I thought, what the heck, I've done it now and it's a good article and it's worth reading so maybe, just maybe, it's worth waiting for.
And then I realised that the theme here links in with my having been to a seminar yesterday organised by the International Society for Knowledge Organization on the "Agenda for Information Retrieval". And what a wonderful afternoon it was. Starting with Brian Vickery, who at 90 years of age has seen it all, on the "Issues in Information Retrieval" which was potted history going back some 70 years. Brian's very interesting approach was followed by Stephen Robertson on "The State of Information Retrieval: a researcher's view" which I must admit lost me a bit what with statistical probability theory and the rather stuffy room at UCL. A swift coffee woke me up enough to appreciate Ian Rowlands' talk on "The Google Generation" which the subsequent discussion decided was a myth.
It was great to catch up with Karen Blakeman and when Karen posts about passing a CV through a tag cloud generator I'll link you up to it. Fascinating discussion over the nibbles afterwards.
And as for sitting with Graham Robertson of Bracken Associates -- he thought it had been fifteen years since we'd last met at an ADSET seminar on information auditing. Although I think it was nearer ten years it was still a long time -- and we both still miss Peter Gillman who has left the information scene completely to concentrate on other work.