Another nail in the coffin...

...for traditional A&I services? Or at least a wake-up call to the more farseeing of them. Time to scramble, add value, innovate, make a difference. Justify your cost to your customers.

Google has just announced their new customizable search engine product. The idea is that you can create an engine that searches a select number of sites and nothing else. This, of course, eliminates the tons of false hits you get from most searches because you're searching non-related sites. Essentially, I could create my own Computer Science Google Scholar (in fact, I just might do that...) and to heck with all the other engines.

This is an incredible opportunity to both scholars and libraries. It allow us to harness our own expertise to create fast and efficient research tools.

The downsides? Of course with great power comes great responsibility. The big problem I see right away is that you have to know the best sites to select for your engine. It allows you to search the entire web along with your selected sites, but that seems to limit the power of being selective. So, if I'm a CS grad student creating my own engine and I'm not bothering to consult with my advisor and/or librarian, maybe I'll just select a few tech report sites or something. Will I know to add IEEE or ACM or Elsevier? Even if I'm somewhat sophisticated, will I know how useful the SIAM journals could be to me? Even if I know that I want to add all those digital collections to my engine, am I sure I know what URL to add to make sure the proper metadata is searched? Do publishers have to do something special? Same with services like arXiv or NCSRTL. You really have to know what you want to make this work well. Great for knowledgable power users but probably worse than full Google if you don't know what to choose.

So, some first impressions. An exciting product with lots of possibilities but still some potential liabilities.