"On Google"
This site is interesting to me, both as a librarian and as a geek, but it does bring up a couple of purely librarian-type pet peeves.
Quoting from one of the comments on the site above: "Some information that USED to be on Google has actually disappeared! I copied it thank God..."
First, not much is actually 'on' Google. Google is a search engine, not a content generating or hosting site. Admittedly that boundary blurs when one moves into the realms of Google Groups and Google Maps, and possibly Google Print, in future. Nonetheless, the main Google function is that of searching content hosted elsewhere on the the internet. Therefore, "I can't find it on Google" is not a particularly accurate phrase, although a colloquialism I can understand and tolerate. But saying content "used to be on Google" and has disappeared is just flat out wrong in most cases.
Which leads me to a related pet peeve: Google's mission statement: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." There is a difference between organizing information and providing keyword access to information. Google provides keyword access to some, but by no means all, websites. It doesn't organize a damned thing except that content it actually creates and/or hosts. And furthermore, last I heard, there's still far more information available in the world that *isn't* on the internet than information that is on the internet. (That may have changed since the last time I went looking for estimates, but a couple of years ago, the body of printed work still outpaced the body of information online.) So I think it's a bit self-aggrandizing for Google to be claiming to 'organize the worlds information', though I have no problem with them saying they want to make information universally accessible and useful.
Quoting from one of the comments on the site above: "Some information that USED to be on Google has actually disappeared! I copied it thank God..."
First, not much is actually 'on' Google. Google is a search engine, not a content generating or hosting site. Admittedly that boundary blurs when one moves into the realms of Google Groups and Google Maps, and possibly Google Print, in future. Nonetheless, the main Google function is that of searching content hosted elsewhere on the the internet. Therefore, "I can't find it on Google" is not a particularly accurate phrase, although a colloquialism I can understand and tolerate. But saying content "used to be on Google" and has disappeared is just flat out wrong in most cases.
Which leads me to a related pet peeve: Google's mission statement: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." There is a difference between organizing information and providing keyword access to information. Google provides keyword access to some, but by no means all, websites. It doesn't organize a damned thing except that content it actually creates and/or hosts. And furthermore, last I heard, there's still far more information available in the world that *isn't* on the internet than information that is on the internet. (That may have changed since the last time I went looking for estimates, but a couple of years ago, the body of printed work still outpaced the body of information online.) So I think it's a bit self-aggrandizing for Google to be claiming to 'organize the worlds information', though I have no problem with them saying they want to make information universally accessible and useful.