Google and its Consequences for Information Retrieval
Google currently dominates Internet searches, results, information seeking patterns, cognitive patterns, and our ways of looking for things. Google has crawled and cataloged images, videos, sounds, and texts, and has categorized them by location, appearance, dimension, time, and in other ways. Further, string searches have become increasingly important, as Google's algorithms keep improving, guessing for the searcher, adding stuff one does not want to retrieve, and obscuring stuff that one is looking for. So much that is not spread by word-of-mouth now comes from Google. It is difficult to imagine what could counter this influence.
What are the challenges facing Google and its users? What are the elements that still prevent effective information retrieval or manipulate the search and retrieval processes? My presentation will address two challenges: The language (and cultural) challenge; and, in more depth, the truthfulness challenge. In this situation how can information retrieval be made more successful?
Sara Nofri has a Ph.D. in communication science at the University of Hamburg and a M.A. in conference interpreting and translation studies from the at University of Bologna, and studied political science and Scandinavian studies at the Ruhr-University Bochum. She has studied, traveled, taught, and conducted research in several different European countries. Her doctoral thesis compared linguistically, quantitatively, and qualitatively the coverage of environmental issues in Sweden, Italy, Germany and the U.K. Since 2006, she has been teaching at several departments faculties in the University of Hamburg. Currently, she is working at a startup project for creating software aggregating Internet data and performing partially automated qualitative analyses of those data.