Bill Dayson
11-30-2004, 07:13 PM
The topic of Googling seems to have generated a great deal of heat on another thread. We saw different people appealing to Google results to support diametrically opposed conclusions about the same school. And we saw people I respect saying that they don't find Google results meaningful. So here's my ideas on the subject.
I think that Google (or any other effective search engine) is an extremely valuable tool for investigating unknown institutions. But some intelligence and discernment has to be applied to the proceedings.
The simplest thing is to just Google the school's name.
But there are pitfalls. If the name is simply typed on the main Google page, it will return all webpages containing all of the search terms anywhere on the page, but not necessarily in the order given. That will generate many irrelevant results. So care needs to be taken to search for the school's name as an exact phrase.
The next problem is interpreting the results. The total number of hits for a basic name search doesn't tell us very much, except how many times the name has been mentioned. It doesn't tell us who is talking or what they are saying.
So we have to pore through the results, looking for hits that are significant in some way. We want to find reliable parties talking about interesting or impressive aspects of the institution. We want to see evidence that professional and scholarly peers are taking the institution seriously. Or we might find damaging information from credible sources.
It's difficult to prejudge in advance what that we might find, and the strength of this kind of general search is that it gives us everything, all of the valuable stuff accompanied by a tremendous amount of noise.
I often try to cut through that noise by specifying websites that are more apt to be credible sources of information. One way to do that is to restrict the search to '.edu' sites. This will only return references to the unknown school that occur on (mostly) American university webpages. That neatly eliminates the countless marketing pages, the posted resumes and most of the random mentions. You can do the same kind of thing with '.gov', '.mil', '.ac.uk' pages or whatever, and see what you get.
Personally, I find the '.edu' results rather telling. That's because universities don't exist in a vacuum. They interact with each other and with the broader academic community. You find universities mentioning other universities' programs. You find graduates being hired. You find post-docs and visiting scholars. You observe collaborations. You see interaction with professional associations and regulatory bodies. You find references to work done. You see publications. You see participation at conferences. You see grants and awards won.
While an absence of that kind of stuff might not be absolute proof that a school is bogus, it's certainly a data point. This stuff is real evidence, it's available to anyone anywhere, and it's very difficult to fake.
The results aren't always negative either. A month or two ago somebody on Degreeinfo mentioned a program in an unusual subject, offered by an obscure university in Lebanon that nobody had heard of. It was Lebanese government recognized, but who knows what, if anything, that means? So I Googled it and found a world famous Islamic history professor at Columbia working with them, their graduates teaching at reputable schools, a scholar receiving a Fulbright grant to do research there, and appearances at international conferences. It definitely suggested academic legitimacy to me, and it helped verify what would otherwise have been a questionable proposition.
I think that Google (or any other effective search engine) is an extremely valuable tool for investigating unknown institutions. But some intelligence and discernment has to be applied to the proceedings.
The simplest thing is to just Google the school's name.
But there are pitfalls. If the name is simply typed on the main Google page, it will return all webpages containing all of the search terms anywhere on the page, but not necessarily in the order given. That will generate many irrelevant results. So care needs to be taken to search for the school's name as an exact phrase.
The next problem is interpreting the results. The total number of hits for a basic name search doesn't tell us very much, except how many times the name has been mentioned. It doesn't tell us who is talking or what they are saying.
So we have to pore through the results, looking for hits that are significant in some way. We want to find reliable parties talking about interesting or impressive aspects of the institution. We want to see evidence that professional and scholarly peers are taking the institution seriously. Or we might find damaging information from credible sources.
It's difficult to prejudge in advance what that we might find, and the strength of this kind of general search is that it gives us everything, all of the valuable stuff accompanied by a tremendous amount of noise.
I often try to cut through that noise by specifying websites that are more apt to be credible sources of information. One way to do that is to restrict the search to '.edu' sites. This will only return references to the unknown school that occur on (mostly) American university webpages. That neatly eliminates the countless marketing pages, the posted resumes and most of the random mentions. You can do the same kind of thing with '.gov', '.mil', '.ac.uk' pages or whatever, and see what you get.
Personally, I find the '.edu' results rather telling. That's because universities don't exist in a vacuum. They interact with each other and with the broader academic community. You find universities mentioning other universities' programs. You find graduates being hired. You find post-docs and visiting scholars. You observe collaborations. You see interaction with professional associations and regulatory bodies. You find references to work done. You see publications. You see participation at conferences. You see grants and awards won.
While an absence of that kind of stuff might not be absolute proof that a school is bogus, it's certainly a data point. This stuff is real evidence, it's available to anyone anywhere, and it's very difficult to fake.
The results aren't always negative either. A month or two ago somebody on Degreeinfo mentioned a program in an unusual subject, offered by an obscure university in Lebanon that nobody had heard of. It was Lebanese government recognized, but who knows what, if anything, that means? So I Googled it and found a world famous Islamic history professor at Columbia working with them, their graduates teaching at reputable schools, a scholar receiving a Fulbright grant to do research there, and appearances at international conferences. It definitely suggested academic legitimacy to me, and it helped verify what would otherwise have been a questionable proposition.