Quietly last winter, OCLC began beta testing a service called Open WorldCat, in which Google and Yahoo searches of authors and book titles would return a link to a page listing libraries near the searcher’s ZIP code [when the ZIP was entered by the searcher].
Longtime readers of this enterprise may recall a time when I wished aloud for exactly such a service. So I thought I was doing a good thing when I posted to Metafilter about this open beta test, but the way in which PageRank works has unintentionally made the page I created the number one hit for the phrase “find in a library” + either of the two authors I mentioned on that page, ahead of the WorldCat results to which I was trying to draw attention.
0 Responses to “Unintended effects.”
Leave a Reply