Google, the Crypto-Taxonomisers

From Fran over at Vocab Control a totally brilliant, thoroughgoing riposte to the foolish, ubiquitous question: “Why do we need a taxonomy? Why don’t we just get Google?”.

Fran steps systematically through the things that Google cannot support well, that taxonomies can do better on (ill-defined searches, disambiguation, “aboutness”, complex queries, comprehensiveness, and more). This piece should be in every taxonomist’s communication armoury.

Fran ends by pointing out that Google itself is using classification and taxonomy work to improve its own performance, and Paul Carpenter over at Bronco has a nice piece unpacking exactly how they are doing that.

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