LibraryTechtonics

Forgive me if this has been covered elsewhere, I’m dreadfully behind in my feeds, and I thought this an observation worth sharing.

I was contemplating the notion of what it would take to create an Amazon-Yahoo!-OpenWorldCat bookmarklet. Ah, the daydreaming of a techie librarian. Unfortunately, Yahoo! is quite sneaky with their result URLs, so it’s a bit tougher to hack, for me, anyway. I might send an email to an aquaintance of mine at Yahoo! to see what I can find out about it, if anything.

In contemplating this, I was fooling around searching for books. When I use Yahoo! to search for a book, the “Find in a Library” OpenWorldCat result shows up on the first page, not entirely near the top, but on the first page all the same.

But when I searched for a book using Google, I had to go to the second or third page of results, sometimes further, to find the “Find in a Library” OpenWorldCat search result, whether I used the title or the ISBN. This is weird, considering that just a few weeks ago, if I searched for a book using Google, the “Find in a Library” result showed up on the first page, often in the first five results. Has anyone else noticed this? Or is it just me?

However, I did discover the nifty trick that if you add “worldcat” to the end of your search string, e.g., “possessing the secret of joy” worldcat, then it pushes the OpenWorldCat result to the top of the list.

Meh. Oddness in searchland. I’ve changed the default search engine in my Firefox search bar to Yahoo!.

Tags: technology