What Librarians Can Learn From AOL

August 9th, 2006

The AOL goof got me thinking about user queries on search engines and how librarians can step up our game in educating on how to research better. If you’ve taken a look at the data, you’ll see an inkling of how users query Web engines. It didn’t shock me to see that people don’t know how to use engines well, they don’t know when NOT to use general search engines, and they, more than likely don’t find what they need based on the searches they perform. And, even though they may think that the answer is “good enough” (we’ve been down this road before), we know better. Just like the word NO is not in my professional verbiage, the same goes for “good enough”.

So, take a close look at the searches released by AOL, and learn from them. You can find out what to add to your next class on research. I’m not advocating for th wrelease of private search data, but it’s out there, so let’s learn from it.

Two resources that you can use are:

+ AOL Site Incoming Keyword Tool - type in a URL and find out what keywords were used to get to that URL. (via)

+ AOL Search Database - Enter in search keywords or Website results (it’s slow)

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