Some secrets are small, almost petty.  When General Motors was chastised for flying into Washington DC on luxurious corporate jets, in order to beg Congress for bailout funds, their reaction was classic.  They tried to keep their flights secret.  GM asked federal aviation authorities to remove the company jets from the public database that shows flightplans for most aircraft. 

Some secrets are unbelievably stupid.  The same week that AIG received its bailout billions, they made a bad decision to send their corporate executives to a meeting at an exclusive resort.  When news of the meeting broke, and general outrage grew, AIG’s response was a classic:  they tried to hold their next meeting in secret!!!

But these are small potatoes.  The big secrets that companies keep are the ones that wind up costing billions and ruining lives.   No one ever really knew what Enron was doing in its energy trading business, or how Bernie Madoff was so unbelievably successful with his investment funds (a 2001 profile of Madoff in Barron’s magazine was titled Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and made a huge point of how secretive Madoff was, and how skeptical his fellow fund managers were of Madoff’s results). 

Even companies on the straight and narrow do enormous damage with the secrets they keep.  Enron and Madoff were crooks, with obvious reasons to hide their activities.  But AIG kept its collateralized debt obligation (CDO) business largely under wraps, until that little-known, little-understood segment of its business dragged down the entire company, and unbelievably, the collapse of this single company appeared to seriously threaten the global economy.  When a corporation is that big — too big to fail, as the saying goes — it is also too big to be keeping secrets. 

I’ve started a blog, No More Corporate Secrets, to give some visibility to this issue, which I think is largely unappreciated in the corporate and financial world, as well as among the government and NGO entities that are supposed to be the overseers of the world of business.

Please put it on your Favorites  list, if this is of interest.

What is it about university-based search engines that makes them — without exception — so frustratingly clumsy?

The latest entry from Carnegie-Mellon University — the Universal Digital Library aka The Million Book Project – should have us all jumping for joy.  Then Million Book Project does exactly what it says — makes a million-plus volumes available for immediate online access. 

Wow!  This is a phenomenal accomplishment.  Amazing.  Undreamed of a mere two decades ago.  The entire world now has instant access to a large research library, covering just about any topic under the sun, and in multiple languages too.

But just try using the danged thing, and you might find your enthusiasm quickly fading.

First off, the images aren’t web-compatible, nor are they based on a common add-in like Adobe PDF.  You need to download not one, but two, separate viewers in order to see the books themselves. 

The viewer downloads don’t happen automatically, when you try to view a book.  Instead, your viewing attempt will simply fail, with no explanation of why.  You need to find the instructions squirreled away in the FAQs, and go through the (unusually cumbersome…including a requirement to register) process for obtaining the software.

Then, if you know exactly what book you’re looking for, you can do a quick Title or Author search.   My search for “Oliver Twist” pulled up 18 copies of, essentially, the same book.  (While this may be useful for scholars wanting to compare editions, one wonders whether it was the best use of limited resources?)

Ready to read Oliver Twist?  Perhaps the book you click on will open, perhaps not.  the volumes housed on the library’s China server, in particular, seem to go through 45 minutes worth of firewalls before deciding whether to grant acces or not.

But if you’re lucky enough to get an image, you can begin reading…one page at a time!  Click to open the page.  Wait. Adjust the viewer format.  Read the page.  Click.  Wait.  Adjust the viewer format again. Read the next page.  Click. Wait.  Adjust the…

There’s no way to access a chapter at a time or, heaven forbid, download the entire book.

Want to search within Oliver Twist for a particular passage you recall from your school days?  Sorry.  No in-the-book searching is available!

I don’t mean to diminish the exceptional accomplishment of the Universal Digital Library…it really is a momentous achievement.  But it just doesn’t flow the way one has come to expect tools on the internet to flow.  For some reason, university-based systems just don’t seem able to manage the flow. 

I’ve written before about the Making of America, and other digital content online at the University of Michigan.  MoA is one of my favorite historic research tools, but it’s so damned slow and cumbersome — right down to its unwieldy URLs — that it seems to be deliberately designed to hide itself from the research community, and to frustrate its users once they happen to find it.

The Internet Archive, which grew up at UC Berkeley, is another university-launched frustration.  Without a doubt, this is one of the internet’s great resources, but still, it’s so hard to manuever around and search that it can make you crazy.  They toyed with full-text search capabilities a few years ago, but it never worked well, and has long since disappeared from view (I can’t even find it in the archive of the Archive!).

Like internet-savvy researchers everywhere, I’ve grown familiar with the fast, easy-access capabilities of in-the-book search engines like Amazon and Google Books, or commercial services like Questia.  Perhaps I’m being unreasonable, but I expect to see these in any online collection, whether of library books, or web pages.  Why can’t universities seem to manage this?

Of course, the Universal Digital Library, MoA, and the Internet Archive all operate on a shoestring, and don’t have the resources of Google or Amazon…or even tiny Questia…to add a lot of capabilities like a user-friendly design and full-text searching.

But somehow, the non-profit Wikipedia manages to do it!

I will now return you to the 20% whimsy portion of your program.

Read the article in the latest issue of FreePint.

If you’re not familiar with Freepint, it’s a great search-and-information-oriented newsletter out of the UK…one of the few I allow past my spam filters. Worth a look…

Happy new year, all.

Dave

P.S.  Some other links I want to tell you about:

Free newspaper archives in the US, by state

Free newspaper archives, international

Free newspaper archives in the US, by region

Free newspaper archives in the UK

Free newspaper archives in Canada

Free newspaper archives in France

Free newspaper archives in Australia and New Zealand

These are great resources for historical research, and all free!

Lastly, here’s a subscription service for archived newspapers that’s far and away the best available…newspaperarchive.com   Well worth a visit.

When Google Answers debuted in the spring of 2002, we, the undersigned, enjoyed the unique opportunities of participating as Google Answers Researchers.

At this time, we wish to publicly express our gratitude to Google, and especially to Andrew Finks and Lexi Baugher, the visionary team behind Larry Page’s rough idea for Google Answers. Finks and Baugher created and championed not only a premium Q&A feature for Google, they unwittingly set into motion the creation of a premium Internet community.

We wish to also publicly thank our many loyal clients without whom Google Answers would not have been successful. For nearly five years, we delighted in tackling your informational challenges, many times learning from the knowledge you requested.

While we are saddened by Google’s decision to retire the Google Answers feature, we are proud to have served such an impressive company, software team, and client base, in our capacities as information specialists.

“Learning is not attained by chance,” wrote Abigail Adams, “it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.”

We agree.

Knowledge_Seeker-ga: Kimberly Gerson, Ontario, Canada
Tlspiegel-ga: Toby Lee, Phoenix AZ, US
Guillermo-ga: Guillermo Arnaudo, Patagonia, Argentina
Journalist-ga: Emily Moore, Knoxville TN, US
Rainbow-ga: Linda Al-Wadi, Lebanon
Cynthia-ga: Cynthia Lystad, Seattle WA, US
Till-ga: Tillmann Stoffel-Kueppers, Juelich, Germany
Missy-ga: Maggie Brazeau, Toledo OH, US
Hedgie-ga: Petr F., Czech Republic, EU
Crabcakes-ga: Barbara (Susie) Cannon, Glendale AZ, US
Politicalguru-ga: Tamar PG
Umiat-ga: June Dufford, Utah, US
Eiffel-ga: Roger Browne, England, UK
Mother911-ga: Ralph Peragine, Long Island NY, US
Scriptor-ga: Oliver Henkel, Germany
Pafalafa-ga: David Sarokin, Washington DC, US
Answerfinder-ga: Phil George, UK
Clouseau-ga: Bob Ulius, Palo Alto CA, US
Hummer-ga: Patricia B., Québec, Canada
Nenna-ga: Jennifer Pringle, Omaha NE, US
Angy-ga: Angela Cockburn, Sydney NSW, AU
Czh-ga: Clara Horvath, California, US
Aceresearcher-ga: Jo, US and New Zealand
Mathtalk-ga: Chip Eastham, Knoxville TN, US
Nancylynn-ga: Nancy, PA, US
Mvguy-ga: Montana, US
Byrd-ga: Chris Rogers, Austin TX, US
Sublime1-ga: John Everest, Phoenix AZ, US
Tutuzdad-ga: Mike Simmons, Arkansas, US
Keystroke-ga: Chapel Hill, North Carolina, US
Larre-ga: L. Rowan
Bobbie7-ga: Bobbie
Boquinha-ga
Thx1138-ga
Easterangel-ga

I’ll be away until early January. If the site needs urgent attention, admins include Missy, Sublime1 and Pafalafaga. If the site goes down, well the server is on my home computer so it will probably stay down until I return.

Have a wonderful festive season, and let’s look forward to plenty of productive searching and researching during 2007!

Most outsiders who comment on the closure of Google Answers spin it along the lines of “Yahoo Answers has won the battle”. Those of us who were researchers know that this is as bogus as saying that “McDonalds has won the battle against the fine restaurant next door”. Each has its own turf, with only a small overlap. It doesn’t have to be “one or the other”; they can co-exist.

Google employee Matt Cutts, on his blog, has a quite different take on the closure. He describes the axing of GA as if it were pruning dead wood or throwing out stagnant water. That’s not how most researchers view it, of course. We think of it as throwing out a cherished but neglected item instead of refurbishing and improving it.

There are some insightful comments to Matt’s post.

(Matt is head of the Webspam team at Google, and the image above is from his blog. It’s supposed to represent a sword slicing through spam, but just at the moment it evokes something different…)

During my stint as a Google Answers Researcher, I had the pleasure to assist many people in their quests for information as well as to learn volumes from my colleagues’ excellent research skills. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for a unique web experience that I will deeply treasure for the remainder of my days.

~journalist-ga, table 42, restaurant at the end of the Googleverse

Personally I think the Bristol guys have too much time on their hands, and that there are better ways to spend one’s time than drawing up dozens of hypothetical formulae to describe a phenomenon that can be explained in one sentence as: Some customers tip; the researchers like it; there’s not really any downside.

But it’s an interesting insight into the minds of the people who work for the University of Bristol’s Centre for Market and Public Organisation. Is Google Answers a market that needs to be organised? Isn’t an “organised market” a contradiction in terms anyway?

Here’s a taste, in case you’ve not yet been tempted to click:

(Thanks to hedgie-ga for bringing this to my attention.)

The Portugese version of Wikipedia has a tiny stub of an article about Google Answers. Here’s a rough translation:

Google Answers is a service offered by Google which allows the users to submit any question and get an answer, by paying 2.50 dollars. An answer to a submitted question is edited by the community itself and sent to the user who asked it…

Clearly this needs some improvement, because the price is variable (from $2 to $200 plus the fifty cent listing fee), and because the paid answer is provided by a “carefully screened researcher” rather than “the community itself”.

So if you have the Portugese skills, please go ahead and edit the article. Anyone can edit Wikipedia!

(via politicalguru-ga and guillermo-ga)

And sooner or later, every afficianado-ga comes face-to-face with an obvious conundrum: Why do so many Google Answers questions go unanswered?

This is a good question. But it, itself, is a hard one to answer.

Some reasons are obvious, like the customers who offer up their two bucks and want a list of every zip code in the United States, the names and addresses of each person within each zip code, whether they own or rent, and a special check mark next to all those who have blue eyes.

And there are other GA clients who establish a certain, er, reputation among the researchers for being difficult to please — endless clarifications, poor ratings, and unrelenting mission creep. Out of a sense of professional decorum, I offer no links to such queries.

Still, there are plenty of questions like the one about diesel and gas engines that seem answerable, but don’t get answered (the poor guy even asked a follow up question wanting to know why his other question wasn’t answered…but the follow-up is in danger of going unanswered too!).

Here’s another one that went begging, on medieval church history, and this one at a hundred bucks.

Nor is there any shortage of unanswered $200 questions, like the customer looking for marketing contacts at banks, or any of these.

Which brings us back to the main topic: Why so many questions that get no answers?

I have my pet notions about this, and I hope to post these in days to come (I’m learning not to promise ahead on posts that I may or may not be able to get around to…).

But in the mean time, what of my fellow researchers and GA question-askers, and even the inveterate peanut gallery…and of course, anyone else who stumbles across this post.

What do you all think?

pafalafaga aka David Sarokin

 P.S.  Here’s a good example of a problemmatic question, due to:

–extreme lowballing on the price

–not knowing quite when to stop asking for things (had they stopped at #1, they had a chance at getting an answer), and

–asking for information that probably doesn’t exist