Comments on: Google’s “Related Links” as a library’s “Find More Items Like This”?

By: LibrarianInBlack

LibrarianInBlack — Mon, 08 May 2006 23:17:17 +0000

librarian-selected resources only” control, but that’s okay by me. Many feel that this is Google’s not-so-sneaky attempt at generating more advertising, but I’ve found that’s the case with many of their beta projects.

By: Liberal Education Today

Liberal Education Today — Mon, 01 May 2006 06:00:02 +0000

can now use Google to publish a few suggested links to their page. Google Related Links is a few lines of code, free for the download, which query Google for content it finds similar to the hosting page each time a user loads the page. One librariansuggests linking this function to a library’s OPAC. (via Disruptive Library Technology Jester)

By: BJorn

BJorn — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 04:35:06 +0000

I’ve read on some adsense blogs that this is an avenue for Google to generate advertisement revenue without having to share it. Obviously there was a bias in their discussion, but the appraisal wasn’t positive. The conclusion, in one instance, was that webmasters would not elect to put this feature on their site when they can get adsense, a similiar thing, and be paid for the clicks. Now I understand they’re not the same thing. But have you ever tried a related: search? It’s not exact science, I’m not convinced that it’s for anything other than geocities homepages.. I’ve seen uses of rss feeds of searches, however, that can do the same thing, and you can customize the look just the way you want.

By: Thomas Dowling

Thomas Dowling — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 13:40:41 +0000

I find it interesting that they run this through googlesyndication.com. I have adblocked scripts from that domain (why should they know all the sites I visit?), and so this page displays nothing at all for the related links.

By: the jester

the jester — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 12:58:06 +0000

It looks like a Google Ad, but it’s not quite. The results displayed are not “advertisements” as such — they are (presumably) suggested search strings, highly relevent web pages, and news stories related to the target page. And, as you point out, no money is changing hands. As proposed, that wouldn’t be the point. The desired effect would be to draw in web content relevant to the bibliographic record in the OPAC display. And, for academic libraries, this would be particularly useful if one could limit the scope of the content drawn in to the “Google Scholar” segment of their index.

By: BJorn

BJorn — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 07:20:19 +0000

It looks like a Google Ad. It’s just like it, except you wont get any money when people click on it. I think it’s too disruptive. You can subscribe to searches from a few search engines and get RSS feeds from them (for that search) and create your own ‘related links’ and it wont end up looking like an ad or drive traffic through Google.