Forum One's Chris Wolz has a very thought-provoking piece comparing the relative online prominence of the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation, two think tanks of similar size ($35 million budgets, 150-200 staff), albeit with quite different political outlooks. He uses data from Alexa, and Technorati, and major newspapers for some metrics, but he primarily relies on Google results. His conclusions?
Overall, I think Heritage is succeeding better than Brookings in building the prominence of its ideas and its work online, including on the blogosphere. This is evident in the wider linking in from other web sites, heavier overall web traffic, and wider blogosphere prominence. While Brookings has about double the prominence of Heritage in two major (online) “mainstream” media outlets, that’s only a (small and shrinking?) piece of the web.
These groups no doubt have different objectives and priorities for the impact of their work. Still, I think this wide different in online prominence noted here would encourage Heritage to try to do more of whatever has been working well for them, and to inspire Brookings to use the web more aggressively. I’ve not gotten into prescriptive ideas here, but it’s a rich topic.
My hat's off to the man for doing some actual legwork and coming up with some honest-to-God data. When's the last time you saw that in a post? You're putting the rest of us to shame, Chris.
I'm struck by the fact that in the absence of better data to work with, Googleability has become the de facto measure of prominence. My wife is an electronic reference librarian at a law school, and she's appalled at the degree to which people rely upon search engines as their sole reference source. In the law and other specialized fields there's a huge amount of information that hasn't yet been made searchable, and people who rely too heavily on the web run into brick walls fast.
But beyond those specialized fields, the rest of us are coming to rely on Google and other search engines, as the parameters of the known world; if it's not on the web it doesn't exist. This would trouble me more if it weren't for two trends. First, the folks are Google are spending a lot of time and money on things like their Library Project, which are making more offline resources searchable every day.
And second--and more to the point of this post--we're all starting to pay a lot more attention to Googleability as a metric of prominence, thanks to work like Chris's analysis, and we're all going to be working a lot harder to insure that the people, organizations and issues we care about get the attention they deserve.
I hear spluttering in the background..."But people will game the system to promote themselves!" Well, what was the standard measure of prominence in the past? Lexis/Nexis searches, and, specifically, mentions in the New York Times. Do you think those sources were game-proof? Or unbiased? Of course not--it just took a lot more money and/or privileged access to game those systems. But now even you can become a Googlebomber. I kid, I kid--that's so 2002.
But it's clear that an aggressive search optimization strategy is an essential element of contemporary advocacy--because if you don't have one, you can bet that your opponents will.
No quibbles with your post, but a few follow-up thoughts on the availability of scholarly information on the Internet: just for the record, sometimes I'm also appalled when people DON'T use search engines when looking for legal materials, particularly current government information from the last 18 months. But what really gets us librarians worked up is that people seem to be losing the ability to formulate a coherent and logical research plan. To find information efficiently, you have to think carefully about what type of information you're searching for and then look in the places where that information is most likely to be kept. If it's an article in a peer-reviewed journal, chances are that looking for a full-text copy on search engines is going to be an exercise in futility. Occasionally, I find academic articles in this fashion (usually posted on professor's web pages), but most of the time you need to turn to subscription databases for this information.
Which brings me to my next point. I'm all for Google's library project, but let's face it, the current copyright law scheme means that a good chunk of scholarly information isn't going to be available for free on the Internet anytime soon. College students and others attempting serious research are fooling themselves if they think that Google can provide it all.
Posted by: Amy | May 13, 2005 at 02:50 PM
For anyone who wants a thorough bibliography on the topic of "do we still need books?" check out this bibliography from Law Library Journal, which does make some of its full-text content available online:
http://www.aallnet.org/products/pub_llj_v97n02/2005-15.pdf
Posted by: Amy | May 13, 2005 at 02:58 PM