Why users like federated search (even though they shouldn’t)

‘Federated Search’ is a library term, it refers to search engines that search a variety of library databases (things that contain journal articles, conference papers and the like) and combine the results in some way to be presented to the user.

Federated searching is a somewhat fraught topic in libraries; many librarians don’t like federated searching and are hestitant to recommend it to library users.  This reluctance is not without good reason–federated search is inferior in many ways to using native database search interfaces, including problems with relevance ranking, the false appearance of comprehensiveness, and the inadequate de-duplication that many offer.  On the other side of this, federated search offers the holy grail of library searching: a single search box (well, almost–federated search usually doesn’t include the local catalogue, though sometimes it does, as in this example at UNSW).  The single search box is seen as being “like Google” in offering users a lot of different content from one search–and even has a slight edge over Google scholar in that search results will usually reflect more closely than Google Scholar which results a searcher can actually access.

Federated search has some issues that would normally be pretty big rpoblems from a user perspective too:

• The relevance ranking doesn’t really work. Because federated search is pulling in material from a range of sources, each of which use different approaches to relevance ranking and different metrics to express a rank.  Any combination of these results is likely to produces flawed relevance ranking.  This means that often, the most relevant results will not be in the magical first couple of pages.
• Federated search is very, very slow.  Again, because federated search is searching a number of remote databases and then applying some metric to combine results before these are presented to the user, federated search is very slow. Typically users are unhappy with slow response times, so this should be a real problem for users.

So, we know librarians are often hesitant about recommending federated search, and that users have every reason not to like it…and yet study after study shows that users do like and use federated search.  So why is federated search so popular?

• One stop shopping: Federated search offers users a one-stop shop, and even though they know it isn’t as good, they will often use it anyway.
• Time saving: Despite the long load time for search results, users know they will save themselves time (and likely frustration) by visiting only a single site.
• Search syntax: Search syntax varies slightly from site to site, and federated search allows users to forgo learning the variationson syntax required by individual databases.  Given that we know boolean searching is hard (sorry, paywall), it is easy to surmise that learning less about it is considered a good thing by users.
• Low user expectations: Users expect library systems to be slow and clunky, so their expectations of federated search are lower than they would be for other web-based services.

Users’ willingness to use a system we don’t expect them to like is an object lesson in how usability principles are not entirely universal: Occasionally users will tolerate unusable systems over more-usable ones because the end result is still a faster and easier user experience.

So, does users’ willingness to put up with the limitations of federated search mean we should stop striving for anything better? I don’t think so.  I think that as web technology improves, users will have less tolerance for slow and clunky systems.  We’ve already seen this at Swinburne with the library catalogue–while it hasn’t changed our users surveys show increasing levels of dissatisfaction as a result of user expectations that have been raised by their interactions with other systems.  I don’t believe that users are going to be willing to individually visit library databases in the future any more than they are now; even Google is meshing different kinds of data in its search results.  I believe there is real benefit to be had for librarians and library users alike in making headway in one-stop searching, I’m very much looking forward to seeing Primo Central and Summon (the next generation of federated search, where metadata is locally indexed making search faster and relevance ranking better) in action.  In the meantime though?  Users still like federated search, even though it is slow and awkward.

Apologising: Google is doing it right

As some of you will know, gmail went down for 100 minutes early thismorning.  I did notice it, but assumed it was my internet connection acting weird again–and I didn’t really need to read email at 7AM anyway.  For people elsewhere, however (for example in the US where this was anything from midday to close of business) and even people in New Zealand where the workday was just beginning this could have been a real problem, especially for those using gmail for business porposes.

Given how reliable Google usually is, this sudden and lengthy failure will understandably shake confidence in the service, and may even make people more righteously angry than service failures by unreliable companies (consider my eyerolling acceptance above, when I thought the problem was my ISP).

Generally speaking, users can think one of three ways when things go wrong (and lets face it, things do go wrong sometimes with any product or service):

• That the product or service is unreliable and therefore they have lost faith in the product or service and the parent company
• That something went wrong, but that the company did what they could about it and the solution was acceptable so they will continue to use the product or service
• That the resolution to the problem was not satisfactory, but that they have no option but to use the company next time anyway (for example when the company has a monopoly–if this is the case though, as soon as the company no longer has a monoply they can expect customers to jump ship).

Google probably has a lot of people in the second category after today, because they did two things right: They updated people, and they wrote a fabulous and public apology.  The apology was probably even more effective than one normally would be because a large company apologised for an outage in a free service, but there are a few other things Google did right:

• They apologised unreservedly, and with an understanding of their users.  There was no “we’re really sorry but it wasn’t our fault” or “we’re really sorry but you shouldn’t be so mad”–they understood why people might be annoyed, and they said sorry.
• They explained the cause of the problem.  Not everyone is going to care about this, but it is good practice to explain for those who do, when writing for a public audience
• They described what they are doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
• They subtly reminded users why they chose gmail in the first place, not by saying “we are the most reliable”, but “we’re trying to keep failures rare”.
• The apology was public (right up there on Google’s gmail blog), but not forced on those who didn’t notice the failure.

This is probably the work of Google’s PR people, but dealing with the failures that inevitably happen in life is a really important part of good user experience, and (I swear I don’t work for Google) this is one that Google have done really well.

How to deal with ‘too much information’: where should we put search refinement facets?

Swinburne Library is in the process of making some changes; we’re replacing our library system with a fancy new one, and as the user-experience-person-in-situ it is up to me to make suggestions for the search and discovery interface our users will see.  Some of those decisions I will blog about here, and search facet placement is one of them.

Search facets are one of the search tools that I think will be most instrumental in making stuff easier to find (and the OCLC report (PDF) on user expectations vs. librarian expectations suggests library users feel the same way). Facets are the little categories you see on search interfaces that let you narrow down your search results to things that are more relevant to you; they started out in tools with well-defined metadata (like eBay and Amazon, and even some of the newer library systems) and they are slowly working their way into searches with less-well-defined metadata, like Google.

With anything new like this, though, you have to figure out where in the search interface to put it.  So far I have seen facets placed to the left of search results:

to the right of search results:

and below search results:

At Swinburne, we talked a bit about facet placement, and in all likelihood ours will be on the left.

So, what are the arguments for and against each position?

• Facets below search results: When facets are below search results, they don’t distract the user when they are viewing search results, which is a good thing.  However, given that the vast majority of users don’t scroll all the way down, and only look at the first couple of pages of search results (and they look more at the first results on these pages), placing facets below search result is pretty likely to mean that users don’t see them or use them.  This likelihood is reinforced by the fact that this is a significantly uncommon location for facets, so users won’t think to look for them here.
• Facets to the right of search results: From a user-centred-design purist standpoint, in my opinion the right-hand position for facets is probably the best in an interface where the language is read from left to right.  This position means that user see search result first, and then facets if the search results don’t contain anything immediately useful.  Given the number of commonly used interfaces that put facets on the left, however, this could be a risky proposal.
• Facets to the left of search results: This is what Google have gone with (possibly because their advertising is on the right).  It is also common in other commonly-used information seeking interfaces, such as eBay, Dymocks (in Australia) and Amazon (for the US and the UK). Use of these interfaces will train users to look to the left for facets; and it would seem that at least a small sample of users have already developed this preference for left-hand search facets.

Swinburne has a real opportunity with this project to provide a search interface for our users that is not “slow motion search, typical library“; however, to do this we must pay as much attention as we can to our users.  Putting the search facets to the left is just one of the decisions we will make with the users in mind, and I hope to blog about more in the future.

Google search isn’t just search anymore

I know I’m a bit lot late to the table with this, but Google search isn’t restricted to just searching anymore!  They’ve introduced some browsing tools as well (see the video below for more):

Now, it’s easy to figure out that I am very pro-browsing, and therefore I think it’s great that Google has included these things into their search experience, but I’d like to unpack just why I think browsing is such a good thing (and make a couple of suggestions for extensions of what Google is doing) along the way.

Google has been very pro-search as an information organisation and finding strategy for a long time, their search-don’t-sort appraoch to gmail being one obvious example of this.  It’s completely understandable that this has been Google’s whole approach for so long, after all, search is what they do (and they do it very well).

Search isn’t always the answer though (and if you watch this video of a Google user experience researcher talking about the search options, it is evident that Google knows that).  For one things, humans employ more than just search in their information seeking strategies: the research (PDF) shows that information seeking is generally an interative process that includes searching, browsing, and refinement.  Not only is search not the only approach we use for finding information, but sometimes search isn’t enough on its own: with all the information on the web, it can be hard to know when someone types ‘Placebo’ into a search box whether they want to know about the psychological effects of sugar pills, or whether they’re interested in the British based rock band (this ambiguity applies to any number of terms). Similarly, information seekers may want a particular type of information (for example reviews, or places where a product can be bought), or information from a particular geographic location, time or author, or general subject field.  Also, even with known-item searches (those where the searcher knows exactly what they are looking for, and that it exists somewhere, because they have found a pointer to it or seen it) if the searcher doesn’t remember the exact words that occur in the document, they might not find what they are looking for.

Google’s ‘more search options’ are beginning to deal with this problem.  They allow people to find three specific types of content (reviews, forums and video), they provide suggested search terms, they allow the user to look at results from a specific time, and also see how the search terms popularity has changed over time.  I’m not entirely sure what value the ‘wonder wheel (see below)’ adds, given that the related search terms provide all the wonder wheel terms and more, but  I suppose some people may find the visual presentation useful.

It certainly is heartening, for someone as vested in browsing as I am, to see Google incorporating browsing into their search.  All I want now is to see it expanded:  I want to filter news by topic and country (and standard search results for that matter); when I use Scholar, I want to be able to browse by author or year.  What Google has provided is an excellent start, and I look forward to seeing where this goes in the future.

The ‘Google effect’: A trend toward mediocrity, or away from it?

Today, there is a special section of the Guardian on digital academic libraries. It covers a wide range of perspectives, and is probably worth a read if you’re interested in academic libraries, digitization, digital preservation, or student habits.

I have to take issue, though, with ‘Academia’s big guns fight the ‘Google Effect”’. The definition of ‘Google effect’ given in this article, and apparently coined by one Tara Brabazon, is ‘a tendency towards mediocrity’. The article goes on to accuse students of information illiteracy, and point out that they like to use Google for everything, which gives them less-than-academic results. Attempts to provide good academic-resource search engines are touched upon, as is Google Scholar (which is ‘acceptable’, but ‘too broad’ according to Professor Brabazon).

There is actually an excellent study (see ‘British library and JISC’ on this page) about information literacy skills of the current generation of university students which is the basis for much of another article in the series. That study found that undergraduates are not necessarily as information literate as they are perceived to be, and that they use ’shallow’ searching and don’t really read online (but neither, necessarily, do their older counterparts).

I’m not arguing with the results of that study — it seems pretty sound to me. I suspect, however, that the thing that has changed with the ‘Google generation’, though, is not actually their information literacy, but their ability access information without strong information literacy skills and/or the help of a librarian. Google, having a very simple user interface, and great results ranking, has made it easy for the average person to find answers to their questions on the internet. It has also shown users that it isn’t necessary to jump through hoops, understand boolean search, or wade through pages of results to find information.

The mediocrity Professor Brabazon has termed ‘the Google effect’ arguably does not apply so much to her students, who I suspect are much the same as always, but to the information interfaces they are forced to use to locate scholarly materials. It is understandable, I think, that students prefer to spend time on their assignments reading and writing, and now they have tools which to them appear to let them bypass the cumbersome, splintered interfaces of academic journals. There is an information literacy problem here, but it is far from “whippersnappers these days not knowing how to use our journal databases”; it is the twofold problem of the proliferation of self-published non-authoritative easily accessible material that is the internet, and the vastly superior search technologies available to sift through that material.

If Professor Brabazon and her colleagues want to encourage young people to use scholarly resources the answer is not to lambast them for being mediorce (when likely they are no different to those who have come before them), nor to throw up their hands in disgust; the answer is to improve search interfaces and online access to academic materials so they can compete with Google, or (in my opinion the more likely solution) encourage widespread use of Google Scholar.

The ‘Google effect’ as I see it is not ‘a tendency toward mediocrity’ in students, it is an exposure of the dire mediocrity of the interfaces and search process for academic material. Google has democratized information searching, and made it possible for the average untrained adult to find information — academic publishers and other information providers need to catch up by providing seamless, well-ranked searches (again most likely through Google Scholar), and at least for those who are subscribers to their resources (either individually or through their institution)* make the results available with a single click. The alternative to this will not be improved information literacy skills, people are not going to learn something more difficult if they believe the tools they have will do an adequate job. I hope the end result of the Google effect will be a trend away from mediocrity–the mediocrity of academic information interfaces–and toward usable information search interfaces for all kinds of materials.

*Agruably, these results should be more widely available than that, but this post is not about the merits of open access, and academic publishers are not likely to change their access model so radically any time soon.

Library 2.0: Library 1.0++

I have to say, I am a little uncomfortable commenting on library 2.0. I’m not a librarian, and I have neither the academic background nor the practical experience to know what Library 1.0 delivery really means, nor what the rationale is (was?) for doing things in a library 1.0 way.

There seems to be a lot of chaos over what library 2.0 actually means, which is no doubt adding to my discomfort posting about it; the general consensus seems to me to be that the difference between library 2.0 and library 1.0 is that library 2.0 is user centric and user driven; and a lot of it seems to be driven by new technologies (though it doesn’t have to be) Now, I’m all for a great user experience, and often that is something that will involve a certain amount of user centrism, but I’m decidedly ambivalent about what it means for libraries.

To go any further with this post, I have to define what I think libraries are (or should be), and this will no doubt get me in a world of trouble with my librarian co-workers: I think libraries are free access point of information of many kinds, with value added in spaces to get that information, and librarians themselves. I think the defining point of libraries is actually librarians; they select targeted authoritative collections, and can help unsure users sort the wheat from the chaff online.

Back to library 2.0, though. Some library blogs refer to library 2.0 in terms of teen gaming nights and library blogs, others talk about user control of information.  I question what any of these things have to do with librarianship — the difference between a library and the internet, as I expounded in my masters thesis, is that a library is a carefully collected information set (and the internet is not).  The internet is always going to have more choices than the library (some of which would never make it in to a library) and users are also going to be far more in control of the likes of Google than they are of EBSCO (unless EBSCO buys PageRank from Google).  Library blogs are notoriously silent, and I can’t really understand what teen gaming has to do with libraries at all.  If these things are the best library 2.0 can offer us, I’m with the Annoyed Librarian. Not only do these things not gel with what I want in a library (and after all, I am a library user too), they seem to dilute what it even means to be a library.

Kathryn Greenhill, however, has a post that makes many aspects of library 2.0 something I could get behind.  It paints library 2.0 as a move away from the purported days-gone-by librarian shusher model (did anyone ever really get shushed?  I never did and I’m not a particularly quiet soul) and toward an era where librarians have control of their catalogue software (thus creating scope for things like user tagging, which are long overdue), library spaces accomodate collaborative and individual work, librarians seek feedback and listen to their users, and library services are available on the internet. Library usability, particularly in terms of online services, has a big part to play in this version of library 2.0 — and I am all for it — and apparently so is Swinburne, because we are doing many of these things already.

The big risk of library 2.0 is throwing the baby out with the bathwater; trying so hard to be everything to everyone that libraries are no longer libraries.  The big opportunity is providing increasingly relevant, increasingly user-friendly and increasingly useful spaces and services.  I think the way forward is to get off the bandwagon — the term library 2.0 is so overused as to be meaningless — and at least in Swinburne’s case, to keep doing what we are doing — listening to our users, and providing the best responses we can in a library context.

iGoogle: Not habit forming

My apologies, I am behind and I have had some lovely comments from those of you who read regularly. My other work has gotten somewhat on top of me over the past couple of weeks, but I think the worst of the storm is past now.

I tried to use iGoogle for a week so I could make some educated comment on it, and the most educated comment I can actually make is that I didn’t actually manage to see the week out. The premise is good, but the execution just wasn’t there to keep me going back.

Part of the problem is that I can get most of the online services I use regularly into it, but not all of them; gmail, my rss feeder, a calendar and weather I could have, but I couldn’t get the metlink timetable, nor an online community I’m a part of nor Facebook in any meaningful way. Given that iGoogle is supposed to be my “one-stop shop”, the inability to access so many things that I use regularly is a substantial failing (and while I am aware that this is not Google’s fault, and someone needs to write a plugin for each of these things, knowing that doesn’t help me any).

The integration with Google’s own services is relatively poor; instead of Google content opening in a new tab the way content from all other applications did, Google content opened in the same tab, obliterating iGoogle (this was actually one of my most common paths out of iGoogle — I would do a search or read a blog post in my RSS feed and simply move on, forgetting I had ever been in iGoogle). Not only did it open in the same tab, but in the cases of gmail and Google reader it presented me with just the content of the email or feed, and none of the usual functionalities of moving to other emails or feeds.

Having failed in the useful stakes, I tried to make iGoogle fun by creating a ‘fun’ tab and adding some dingbats and crosswords and such; I also kept the original funny cat picture that it came with. I set the background to be the solar system (though I did think the one that had the sun rise and set in tune with local time was kind of fun) and tried really hard to be engaged. The only thing out of the whole lot that I liked was the funny cat picture, and I actually get my fill of those by subscribing to ICanHasCheezburger. Again, it isn’t iGoogle’s fault that I couldn’t find a cryptic crossword, but when you have to work too hard to have fun, well, it isn’t fun anymore.

One of the fundamental principles of usability is that if there is a conventional way to do something (like the top right-hand search box, for example), then you better be making a usability improvement if you break that convention, and it better be a significant improvement, or the convention being broken just overshadows whatever you are trying to do. I think it is the same with people — if you want people to change their usual habits, you need to have a compelling incentive for them to do so. If iGoogle really did create a one-stop-shop for all my web things, if it had a good interface, or even just if it was fun it could have formed a new habit for me. However, it fails on all these counts, and I have to say if I go back, it will only be to look at the cat pictures.

Google Maps: A classic case of value added

Google maps as maps just aren’t that great. They don’t include a scale, and lifestyle leandmarks like schools and gyms are not marked. For Melbourne, the local knowledge that goes into streetdirectory.com.au makes that a much better map, and whereis gives better directions with more options.

However, Google Maps is something special for four reasons:

1. In the bad old days, many map publishers (for example Wises in New Zealand) required you to pay to look at their online maps. Once Google Maps was launched, that business model no longer worked for them because people are unlikely to pay for what they can get for free. So now, not only can you look at Google Maps for free, but many other maps as well.
2. The integration into search results, while it is cross-promotion for Google, is also really useful when you’re looking up a business. For me, living in Melbourne without a car, it is important to know a business I select is near the transport network, and the recent integration of maps into search results lets me do that.
3. It’s everywhere. It might not be so easy to find a really good maps site in another country, especially if that country has a different national language or uses another character encoding. Tony points out that it is even good in Japan’s notoriously complex address system.
4. The thing that really makes Google Maps stand out is the photographs. While I agree with Sara that they are a little bit scary, I also really enjoyed looking at the places I have lived, and worked, and the places that are important to me. I also like all the weird and wonderful artworks that have come out of Google looking down from the sky at us, like the man shaped lake in Brazil. Some things seen by Google’s eyes in the sky are beautiful, and some of them are odd, surprising, and ultimately controversial, but it certainly has brought a different view of earth to the average internet-connected human being.

Each of those four things is value added over a traditional map, and even over many other online maps — they give the user that little something extra that makes it worthwhile coming back. For me, the real selling point is the photos, though: they take something that is a tool, and essentially boring, and make it fun.

Google books: A great reference tool and nothing more.

As a reference tool, Google Books is pretty good. You can do a normal search, and get as results any matching books that Google has indexed. With the recent burgeoning of Google deals with large and well known libraries (for example The NYPL, Oxford University Library, and Harvard Library), Google Books looks set to include the full text of a decent chunk of published works. This means it is now possible to effectively run a Google search on the content of a very large library, and have the results returned in a relevance ranked order with little snippets of text for context. It’s also possible to add the things you read to a “personal library”, assuming that you have a Google account, meaning that when you just have to find the poem you read in a book that includes the line ‘the stars carried the helpless one ribbed moon away’, you can search specifically in the books you have read.

There are a few implications of this technology, though, that are problematic. The first is that under the current law, Google is being sued for copyright infringement because they have to make a copy of the works they make searchable to create the search index. Normally I would think this was a reasonable use (even though technically it’s legal), but there is a loophole that I discovered yesterday that does make me slightly uneasy on behalf of all poets: The context that Google provides around the search terms in the results allows you to search for the next line of the poem, and for a short poem, it is relatively easy to read the whole thing. Admittedly this is a somewhat cumbersome process, and admittedly it is not likely that any poet will lose a sale out of it, but you see these snippets without direct attribution to the poet, if your search results come from an anthology, and this is a sad loss of a moral right for the poet involved.

The second problem is that this knowledge is tied up in a commercial corporation who by law has first responsibility to their shareholders, but by popular cachet is the source of information on the internet. Libraries are nervous about a monopoly on information, and while some may view this as just one more twist in the historical antipathy between libraries and Google, I think it is in line with the freedom of information principle that it should be available from more than one source, if possible.

The third issue is one that is close to my heart, and one that Sara and some of these comments got me thinking about. Google books are great if you already know what you are looking for, but if you don’t have some search terms already, it’s hopeless. More than that, though, there is no serendipity: you go, you type in some words, you find the book and either read it online, buy it, or reserve it at your local library, and you leave. You never get to see the book on the shelf next to it might also have been useful, or just walked past a display that might have had something interesting for other reasons. Now, chances are that some people wouldn’t have bothered to go find a book if they didn’t have Google books, but some of them would have. Improving serendipitous information encounters (i.e. online browsing of information sources) is something that attracts a lot of research attention (including my own, for a year), and some novel approaches. And to me it is this that is the real user experience failing of Google books — not that I don’t want to actually read online, not the copyright issues, but that their browsing experience is boring and cumbersome and smacks of an afterthought. Until Google can provide me the same rich browsing experience that an actual library or bookstore does, it will only be a reference tool.

Google Docs: Online and free, but limited.

Google docs is a service that allows those with a Google account to edit, store, and share Microsoft-like documents online (or export them to a Microsoft format and use them as usual offline). Now, I am all for anything that can reasonably save me from the torture that was the write-up of my masters, when MS word redefined some of my pictures as millions of page breaks when I put page numbers into my thesis (I suspect the character combination used to represent a page break is something that could conceivably appear in a jpeg file), but I don’t think Google’s word processor is it — and I suspect this holds true for the other document editors as well (certainly I have recently read one report of a catastrophic crash of the presentation-making software).

I’m going to speak about the word processor in Google Docs rather than the rest of the suite, because I have the most experience with it. At first glance it appears very much to be a stripped down word processor, not unlike the blog editor I am using right now. On the face of it, this should be enough for the majority of users, based on the 80/20 rule. Sadly, though, this is not the case. There are some areas where Google’s word processor has missed the opportunity to improve over Word, such as picture placement, which is horrible in Word and merely average in Google Docs. There are some areas where Google Docs is limited by what HTML can offer, for example the limited customisability of lists, and the inability to add drawings (for diagrams for example). There are other ways in which Google Docs could have capitalised on its HTML capabilities and hasn’t, for example not opening hyperlinks when you click on them (ideally in another window or another tab). I don’t know what kind of a limitation it is that forces Google Docs to open everything in a new tab, but that is also fairly seriously irksome (and would be even more so if using an un-tabbed browser). And for me, the lack of integration with bibliographic software is a real problem (though I am aware that this is a specialised usage).

The thing that concerns me most about Google Docs, though, is writing any kind of work-related document under Google’s privacy umbrella. I have Google email, and Google pictures, I write a couple of Google blogs, and I have lists of books I want to read and movies I want to see in Google documents. I actually don’t think there is any such thing as total privacy on the web, and I don’t mind Google sucking up my personal information — I am the only person that can affect. I am less comfortable, though uploading documents related to my work (which is not even all that confidentail but which affects people other than me) to a site with this in the Terms Of Use (TOU):

“You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Service. By submitting, posting or displaying the Content you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through the Service for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its Privacy Policy.” (link).

Given that the Google Docs privacy policy incorporates the Google privacy policy, and the Google Privacy policy is subject to change — with your consent, if your privacy is reduced, though I am guessing it would be Hobson’s choice (accept the new terms or go elsewhere) — and given that it takes three weeks to expunge account details if you terminate your account…I am simply not comfortable storing work-related material on the servers of a commercial company whose interests could run counter to that of my employer. Maybe this makes me a paranoid luddite who should be wearing a tinfoil cap, but when it comes to information about my employer I am finicky (even though I doubt they would care).

This is not to say that there aren’t some wonderful features of Google Docs, however. The autosave is excellent and functional, and I wish MS had done this well with their autosave (saving to avoid lost work is a mechanical, repetitive task and should be done by a machine). This autosave is coupled with excellent versioning, so if it autosaves something you later decide you don’t want, you can go back to the earlier version. I haven’t tried the sharing features, but it would be hard for them to be worse than Microsoft Word (and with the versioning, it is likely that they are better). There are two big drawcards for Google Docs, though: It’s free, and it’s online. For me, these are the reasons I use Google Docs at all. I can access it from anywhere just by clicking on a link in my email, and I keep lists of books I want to read and movies I want to see that I can add to from anywhere.

Google Docs is great for information you want to keep online, but if you’re looking for a more fully functional free document package, or one that isn’t online, I recommend OpenOffice.