Google and Informal Reference

Since coming to library school I've participated in a fair amount of disparaging of search engines.  While I agree with the premise that search engines aren't the be-all-end-all of research that a lot of lay people consider them to be, and while I don't that they aren't going to be replacing librarians or more formal reference queries anytime soon, I also don't want to to underestimate the value of search engines, and Wikipedia, and other informal research tools, and the way that they have revolutionized the availability of information.  

This week a co-worker of mine came in wearing a shirt which had a word written across it in an Asian script.  I asked her if she knew what it meant, but it turned out she'd just bought it at the Salvation Army because it looked cool.  I decided to take on the challenge of finding out what it meant.  I copied it as best I could onto a scrap of paper which I shoved in my pocket.

When I got home that afternoon I did a little detective work.  My guess was that it might be Khmer, the language of Cambodia.  This is where people always stop be in telling these types of stories-- wait, how did you even make such a guess?  I don't really know how I know half the things I know except to say that I've always been the type of person who browses encyclopedias and stares at tables of flags of the world or scans bilingual menus in Chinese restaurants until I can guess, by process of elimination, which character means "chicken" and which means "pork".  So I can't really tell you why the font resonated with me as Khmer, but it seemed like a reasonable guess.

I started out on Wikipedia, looking at the entry for "Khmer alphabet" but my computer lacked the ability to process the fonts so I just saw a bunch of boxes and symbols.  So I did a Google image search for "Khmer alphabet" instead and found several tables to compare my crumpled handwritten letters to.  They didn't match, and I concluded that it wasn't Khmer after all.  Thai, then?  Again, as much as I tried to make them, the letters didn't match.  Let's see... Vietnamese uses a Roman alphabet, what other countries are in Southeast Asia.  Laos?  Bingo, my letters were there on the Lao alphabet charts.  Now I figured that since I was working with an alphabet, it doesn't matter whether you understand the letters-- as long as you have a chart of the alphabetical order you can browse a dictionary.  This is where I ended my informal Google-led research and headed to the library because I thought pages of a book would be easier to browse than pages of a website.  I found a Lao-English dictionary, consulted the page on alphabetical order, and found the word pretty quickly: "Laos".  The shirt said "Laos" in Lao.

So while I know Google's not always the best tool for a reference query, with a little creativity on the part of an experienced researcher it can be a great shortcut.  In all the research took about twenty minutes.  And while it really wasn't that hard, it was fun to impress my co-worker when I brought in the photocopied dictionary page the next day.