Comments on: Marketing Search: An Interview with Pete Bell of Endeca and Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/marketing-search-an-interview-with-pete-bell-of-endeca-and-gabriel-weinberg-of-duckduckgo/ An open access, peer reviewed journal Wed, 12 Apr 2017 13:04:34 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.3 By: Brett Bonfield http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/marketing-search-an-interview-with-pete-bell-of-endeca-and-gabriel-weinberg-of-duckduckgo/#comment-2951 Fri, 13 Aug 2010 02:45:40 +0000 http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=2261#comment-2951 Thanks, Ellie. I agree with everything you wrote, and wish my response had been as clear and nonconfrontational as yours.

]]>
By: ellie http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/marketing-search-an-interview-with-pete-bell-of-endeca-and-gabriel-weinberg-of-duckduckgo/#comment-2946 Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:20:53 +0000 http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=2261#comment-2946 As someone who really hates business speak, I see both (maybe even more) sides here.

It’s important to be able to speak to our funders in a language they understand. Business speak is just one of many languages with annoying buzzwords. Education has its own annoying buzzwords. (I’ve seen eyes glaze over when the word pedagogy comes out.) Annoying buzzwords shouldn’t stop us from pulling out whatever valuable information lies beneath them.

I’m lucky to be in an academic institution where the currency is primarily student success (which sometimes draws its own eye rolls) rather than dollars and I’m lucky to not be in a position where it is one of my main responsibilities to be able to justify the library or our funding to higher ups, but I’ve seen some of those conversations in action and it’s important to be able to talk the talk if you want to be able to fund whatever items and activities you are planning to help your community thrive. And it’s a very very different talk depending on who you’re asking for money as Brett explained in his talking to donors article. (http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/what-your-donors-and-would-be-donors-wish-you-knew/)

The other aspect that I think is important is that the business sector has been studying and publishing on these topics and has valuable research that we can learn from. As much as I might instinctively dislike terms like branding, marketing, and PR, the fact remains there are better and worse ways to interact with your patrons and if people are hiding those better ways under terms I don’t like, I’m the only one who loses by ignoring them.

That said, I also agree you can lose your staff if you switch over to using the same annoying buzzwords with them. I signed up for a certain type of job which was distinctly not business focused and am much more likely to be motivated by language and systems of evaluation that play to my beliefs in what a library is and should be.

There will always be articles and books saying how we all need to do X, and taking on a more profit sector approach has had its turn as X. I think it’s that “we all need to” approach that turns normal words into those annoying buzzwords. I hope in general, you won’t find those “you must” admonitions here. We tend to fall into, “is there anything we can learn from X and apply to libraries?” I’ll call back to Char’s recent post about librarian as shapeshifter. (http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/librarians-as-__________-shapeshifting-at-the-periphery/) I think it’s valuable to be able to understand as many approaches to a situation and motivators of people as possible so we can be more informed about what is likely to give us the results we want.

Broadly speaking, in order for these two entrepreneurs to succeed, they need to have a product that people use (that would be true whether they’re for profit or not). So their discussion of user behavior in terms of information seeking is interesting to me. In particular I like the idea of making user feedback at the point of the problem (on our website in particular) a simpler process. I just looked, and once you’re in my library’s catalog there is no button to ask a librarian or provide feedback. Providing search may be only one of the many things we do, but it is something we do and I’m happy to see how others approach it and what I can learn from them. Now I need the next article to be on working with committees to implement the cool things we learn…. (Great recent Shelf Check on this – http://www.toondoo.com/cartoon/1998046)

So Caleb, I’m with you that I don’t think it’s the only way we should frame ourselves, but I do think that we shouldn’t ignore good research that we can use. Thanks Brett for the interesting questions and Gabriel and Pete for taking the time to answer them. I’ve already sent the article, highlighting the natural feedback section to our web team.

On a more personal geeky level, I love the precision v. recall discussion. Thanks again.

]]>
By: caleb tr last time i promise http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/marketing-search-an-interview-with-pete-bell-of-endeca-and-gabriel-weinberg-of-duckduckgo/#comment-2943 Sat, 07 Aug 2010 06:31:18 +0000 http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=2261#comment-2943 Semantics, yes, I think it is important. It is the study of meaning!

I think your transportation analogy illustrates my point perfectly. The corollary to librarians might be bus drivers, and the corollary to Google might be General Motors. One provides a professional service and another is a company that makes several products that perform similar, but fundamentally different services. One tries to help a community thrive, the other seeks to profit. They serve entirely different needs and play entirely different roles in meeting them. “As it turns out, bus drivers aren’t the only ones who compete with General Motors.” But I see also with a really broad field of vision, yes, they are in the same category (ie, the 380s?).

But really, not to harp. This is fun stuff to think about. I contend it is damaging to libraries to frame ourselves in the rhetoric of the private sector. When we use their language and systems of evaluation – competition, branding, return-on-investment, business model – we de-emphasize that libraries provide a completely different way of understanding and bettering the world.

]]>
By: Brett Bonfield http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/marketing-search-an-interview-with-pete-bell-of-endeca-and-gabriel-weinberg-of-duckduckgo/#comment-2941 Fri, 06 Aug 2010 01:53:32 +0000 http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=2261#comment-2941 Thanks for your follow-up response. Discussions like this one are one of my favorite aspects of the Lead Pipe. And I’m particularly pleased that you brought another non-librarian into the discussion. I like it when non-librarians share their knowledge with us and I like it when we pay attention to their ideas.

As for your questions and critiques, I think much of our disagreement may be semantic.

Before I was hired to work at my local public library, I worked at Temple University. To get from my home in South Jersey to Temple’s North Philadelphia campus, I could drive myself in a car or I could carpool or hire a taxi or take various forms of public transportation (rail and buses) offered by two different organizations (one based in New Jersey and the other based in Pennsylvania) or ride a bicycle or run or walk. There are various additional decisions implied by the above: which bridge to take, what kind of car to use, which car pool, what kind of bicycle, what kind of running shoe, running shoes versus running barefoot, and on and on.

I have no idea if my commuting options (or, rather, the people who work for and champion the institutions behind these options) believe they’re competing with each other or if they believe they can “set themselves apart,” take their ball and go home, and distance themselves from the choices I make regarding the money, time, and loyalty I will invest in the method or methods I choose for getting to work. While I don’t know what they believe, I know what I believe: the word that describes the relationship between these institutions is “competition,” and that they are “competing.”

I also believe that what you’re suggesting librarians do to distinguish our services from Google’s is called branding. Using the philosophy and methods involved in a branding-based business strategy might be a useful way for librarians to “set themselves apart,” which I’ll define as competing more successfully with Google, as well as companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Netflix and Audible and Starbucks, to provide goods and services that people who rely on us find valuable.

I agree that “business-speak is dangerous” when it is used by people who aren’t interested in the lessons business has to offer, just as sports analogies probably shouldn’t be used by people who don’t like sports. There’s nothing wrong with disliking business or sports, but I think it’s important to recognize that some people have developed pretty sophisticated ways of describing how they work, and if you don’t understand the vernacular or the ideas then statements you make about them might not make a lot of sense to people who do.

Unfortunately, even though the author of the article you cite above, Vivienne Waller, seems to have very little interest in business, this doesn’t stop her from occasionally trying to play business analyst while writing about Google. For instance, she concludes one of the longer sections of her article with the following sentence:

“Whether one thinks that Google is more likely to end up having a monopoly on information or is more likely to go broke, the issue is one of the lack of public control over a private company.”

1. So is Google going to take over the world or go out of business? Because if what actually happens is anywhere between those two extremes then her concerns don’t make much sense. And if both scenarios seem equally likely her concerns don’t make much sense, either.

2. There is public control over Google. Corporations deal with a significant amount of regulation, especially in Google’s home country.

3. Google is not a private company. It went public more than five years before Waller’s article was published; in addition to its regulators and its customers, Google has to answer to its shareholders.

I won’t address every point in your response–I realize this response is already far too long–but I want to address some of your final points. In reverse order:

* “Is the idea of a non-profit technology company so unfathomable?” Are we talking about OCLC? Sorry, that was flip. Leaving OCLC out of it for the moment, my last job before going to library school was with a non-profit technology company. We had a business model. Every non-profit has one, even if they haven’t drafted one and none of their employees believe they do.

* “Why should WorldCat.org need a business model?” Because it needs to appeal to people and because OCLC’s servers and programmers and other expenses don’t pay for themselves.

* There’s nothing to stop anyone from making a PageRank competitor “designed to help people be free instead of to make money.” There are open source alternatives for just about every major piece of consumer-focused software. Here’s my theory: it wouldn’t look all that different from Google’s algorithm. I believe Google is interested in meeting people’s needs rather than dictating what their users want. True, Google is now popular enough that there’s no longer much of a control group. But Google’s business model does not seem to be predicated on dictating people’s happiness with their search product. Which is why DuckDuckGo and Endeca are so interesting to me: their business models are also centered on meeting people’s needs.

* I’m not sure what public libraries’ goals are and I’m growing more and more certain that no one does. I see a lot of statements like, “Our goals are to help our communities thrive, to give citizens and scholars vital tools to make our world better,” as you wrote above, and, as Waller writes, “public libraries aim to provide access to information in order to strengthen democracy.” Personally, I think these are the truly empty statements. What do these statements actually mean? Where’s the testable hypothesis? Where’s the data? Where’s the accountability? Ultimately, that’s what interests me about acknowledging our competition with Google and other companies, and that’s what I hope we can learn from people like Gabriel and Pete. I think entrepreneurs generally know if they’re doing a good job. As the director of a public library, I have nothing trustworthy to use in determining whether I am.

]]>
By: caleb tr http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/marketing-search-an-interview-with-pete-bell-of-endeca-and-gabriel-weinberg-of-duckduckgo/#comment-2939 Thu, 05 Aug 2010 07:01:54 +0000 http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=2261#comment-2939 Sorry, I realize that I was being a bit flip myself, and I apologize.

I read your post, and I understand that you are discussing the kinds of things that libraries can learn from search engines, that Google isn’t the only option. It is a great conversation to have, and kudos to you.

Your lead sentence, “As it turns out, librarians aren’t the only ones competing with Google” sets off alarms because you are stating something as fact that needs to be weighed and discussed. So please respond in whatever way you feel is appropriate, given the context, but I hope that you, or someone else, can give a reasoned explanation for why you think what you say is true.

“Librarians compete with Google”.

I think this simple statement is empty, as evinced by your link to a Google search for ‘librarians “compete with google”‘. Very few of the links in the first few pages come close to addressing my question, and the fact that you posted the link at all suggests a deep lack of understanding of the difference between the work that librarians do and what companies like Google do. But that doesn’t seem likely, so I’m guessing you were responding to me as a potential troll.

What do we mean by ‘compete’? Do we mean that libraries, as non-profits and government agencies vie for the revenues and markets that for-profit corporations like Google do? I’m as cynical as anyone, and there are definitely corporations that want to end all taxes (at least on themselves – there are no subsidies without taxes), but I don’t think that is what we are talking about here.

Do we mean that libraries and search engines, as providers of information, are essentially providing the same services, and therefore, “compete”? Your biography on this site says you are a public library director, and I find it hard to believe that anyone would put early literacy efforts, providing study space or access to the internet in the category of things Google does.

The idea that people go to libraries for information is a myth. People go to libraries for the information they think can be found in libraries. For most of us, it is a pretty narrow scope. George Needham wrote in the OCLC blog It’s All Good in January 2006 comparing a 1947 report on public library use with OCLC’s Perceptions… report from 2005, “The biggest consistency has been in people failing to see libraries as a primary information source” (http://scanblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/public-use-of-library-and-other.html).

But you might also mean something a little deeper, that there is a perception that with Google, people don’t need libraries. Or with Amazon.com, people don’t need libraries. And so, libraries must “compete” to prove their relevance. I’m paranoid enough too hear some of those voices saying these things, so I can get behind this definition. But I still don’t agree that that search engines actually do the things that libraries do, or that they will, or that we should pretend to “compete” with them in one of the above senses. No, instead, we should look to set ourselves apart.

Vivienne Waller, in an article for FirstMonday argues that Google and public libraries have fundamentally different missions (http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2477/2279). She argues that the drive for profit competes (if you will) with the drive for public good.

Libraries are not here to make money. Our goals are to help our communities thrive, to give citizens and scholars vital tools to make our world better. Sometimes I wonder what an algorithm for ranking search results would look like if it were designed to help people be free instead of to make money.

I think also that business-speak is dangerous. It is often helpful to understand how businesses operate and the innovations they produce, but in the end they are not a good model for the public sector. Seeing ourselves as competitors blinds us to the real possibilities and potential for libraries. You asked one of your interviewees to look at worldcat.org, and he says, “I suppose the business model is clicking through to Amazon or whatever”. Why should WorldCat.org need a business model? Is the idea of a non-profit technology company so unfathomable? Is it that from a business perspective, resource sharing doesn’t make any sense at all?

I love Waller’s closing paragraph and will resist quoting the whole thing. Most of all, I want to point out that she suggests that “There should be endless and difficult debates”. Thanks for the opportunity.

]]>
By: Brett Bonfield http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/marketing-search-an-interview-with-pete-bell-of-endeca-and-gabriel-weinberg-of-duckduckgo/#comment-2937 Wed, 04 Aug 2010 21:04:33 +0000 http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=2261#comment-2937 Thanks for your questions. I’d be happy to talk about librarians competing with Google, though based on your questions I’m not sure which aspects interest you or how detailed you want my response to be. I guess it’s safe to assume the information available on these websites doesn’t meet your information needs.

Not to get all reference interview on you, but what kind of response from me would make you happy?

]]>
By: caleb tr http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/marketing-search-an-interview-with-pete-bell-of-endeca-and-gabriel-weinberg-of-duckduckgo/#comment-2936 Wed, 04 Aug 2010 18:43:37 +0000 http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=2261#comment-2936 Librarians compete with Google? Can you explain that with more than a flip remark?

]]>
http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/marketing-search-an-interview-with-pete-bell-of-endeca-and-gabriel-weinberg-of-duckduckgo/feed/
inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-17
40754
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:LGXDOGVMSX3LSWSK54X46NVY3JSHBT7V
<urn:uuid:1d1f2080-c4ec-45cc-87df-11f3491e2092>
2017-04-25T14:26:53Z
152.19.134.41
sha1:ZGBHXSDYESUUSYLMJXFAX2HET7HRTOFG
<urn:uuid:9dd57da4-9402-493a-ab64-d59080f35f51>
http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/marketing-search-an-interview-with-pete-bell-of-endeca-and-gabriel-weinberg-of-duckduckgo/feed/
length
response
<urn:uuid:fc44f96a-a7bf-49bf-bb6a-8716a9020707>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-145-167-34.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-17
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf