Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Google is smarter than Harvard.

Just in case you were wondering, Google is actually smarter than Harvard and here's the proof ...

In searching for this book, "Weisber, Stewart E. (2009). Barney Frank: The Story of America's only Left-handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman," my first stop was Harvard's online library catalog, Hollis, where I entered the information exactly as I had retrieved it from a Wikipedia entry about Boston's Combat Zone. Hollis responded in this manner, "No results found. Your query did not produce any results."

It seemed odd to me that the world's largest university library system would have no record of a book. So I entered the same information into a Google search, which immediately returned this, "Showing results for: Weisberg, Stuart E. (2009). Barney Frank: The Story of America's only Left-handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman," with a link to Amazon, followed by another 5,919 after that.

I am certain there is a raging academic debate as to whether an online university catalog should require an exact citation or not   this is after all the kind of thing that academics debate   but in a world where the people's encyclopedia Wikipedia offers up an erroneous reference and Harvard draws a blank on it, it is nice to know that some geeks in Mountain View, California are smart enough to figure it out. The score is now Google 1, Harvard 0.