Two years ago, Google Books was called out for their poor indexing and search results by a Berkeley professor. Google Books’ fumbling search facility was a real challenge for researchers. Though Google offered to correct any errors that were brought to its attention, the professor doesn’t feel it is any better. Doing his own research, he continues to come across errors similar to those he brought to their attention two years ago.
We found this interesting information on The Times Higher Education in their article, “Do you feel lucky? Google Books is at heart a catalogue of errors.”
“The changes are a drop in a greatly enlarged ocean,” Professor Nunberg said, adding that the flaws in Google’s metadata remain “a big systematic structural problem”. It seems Google hasn’t cleaned up their metadata so that the indexing can actually work as it was originally intended.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
