Ga-Ga over Google

~2008 NYSLAA Conference Report~

Ga-Ga Over Google
Presented by - Inga Barnello and Kari Zhe-Heimerman, LeMoyne College

Workshop attended and reported by:
Heidi Jensen, PLShq

It was presented by Inga Barnello and Kari Zhe-Heimerman, both ladies are Reference Librarians at LeMoyne College. I learned a lot of information about Google. Our workshop agenda was to hear about the Google story, learn cool tools for work & play, and to learn what’s ahead for Google. Google is a name that was created by doing a play on words. The word Googol is 1 followed by 100 zero’s. Google is a name that was created from this word.

Google’s mission is simple - To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. In 1995, Larry Page & Sergey Brin meet at Stanford University and by 1998 Google was launched in Beta form. In September of 1999, the beta label was removed. Google went public on August 19^th, 2004 for $85 per share. People didn’t think Google was going to really take off. On the day of our workshop, Google price was $581.91 per share. We learned this information from Finance.google.com. Google became an official Verb in the Webster dictionary in 2006.

In the early days, AOL and Yahoo made Google their default search engine. One of the early problems with Google was that it was easy to manipulate. This has since been changed. We also learned about different things that Google owns that helps to make Google the business they are today. Some of the things Google owns are, YouTube, Blooger.com, Picasa, DoubleClick, Sketchup, Keyhole and dMarc Broadcasting.

Google is currently working on a book project. This is still in Beta form. You can find this at Books.google.com. The idea behind the Google book project is to help people find books that they wouldn’t find any place else – such as those out of print. For this project, Google has partnered with Ebay, Echostore, Mozilla, many libraries and OCLC. OCLC is giving MARC records to Google for FREE. Something to remember about Google ~ Google tracks all your information when you are any of their sites. Google saves every search from every person – forever. The idea for this is that you can learn more about what consumers want and need and they can adjust their marketing accordingly. The FBI has asked Google to give information about what people are search and Google refuses to do such things. Some Google tools for reference – for when helping a patron, you can go to the Google home page and click on ‘More’. You can find Google scholar, Google books, Google finance, Google news – which you can limit to a local area, and many other things. In our workshop we went over many different areas of Google. I’m not going to go into all of them in this report but I’m more than happy to answer questions that anyone might have.