Man or Machine: Twitter or Google? Who will win?
Ah, the Legend of John Henry -- he's the fella who went up against a steam engine -- and won!And who remembers the Desk Set with Tracy & Hepburn -- a reference librarian goes up against a computer -- and wins! In 2000, I vaguely recall people fretting: should Google replace DMOZ, the open directory project? After all, Google's PageRank is formula-driven. You get machine-generated results -- but the Open Directory project had real humans indexing web sites. Won't DMOZ be better? 
Google won that round, quick.So imagine my surprise when someone expressed outrage that I ask people questions on Twitter:
It appears we've gone full circle! From my perspective, I found the outrage batty. Asking people a question isn't dehumanizing: it's social. Ask a question of Google, and a well-implemented algorithm will respond. Ask a question on Twitter, and people who want to be helpful might respond. And if they don't want to answer a question, they won't. I ask questions on Twitter when I want a human to answer. And lately, when I ask a question on Google, it's for expedience. (Most of the time, Wikipedia is among the first 5 results, which leads me to believe that I should just go to Wikipedia if I want expedience.) Other than Wikipedia, most of what Google has been delivering lately hasn't been that relevant.Twitter isn't as speedy, but at least I'm getting relevant answers.Where do you ask most questions online? Man or machine? Twitter or Google? Or somewhere else entirely?

by Stefan Baudy
Google won that round, quick.So imagine my surprise when someone expressed outrage that I ask people questions on Twitter:
You're treating people as if they're your own personal search engine! Dehumanizing!
It appears we've gone full circle! From my perspective, I found the outrage batty. Asking people a question isn't dehumanizing: it's social. Ask a question of Google, and a well-implemented algorithm will respond. Ask a question on Twitter, and people who want to be helpful might respond. And if they don't want to answer a question, they won't. I ask questions on Twitter when I want a human to answer. And lately, when I ask a question on Google, it's for expedience. (Most of the time, Wikipedia is among the first 5 results, which leads me to believe that I should just go to Wikipedia if I want expedience.) Other than Wikipedia, most of what Google has been delivering lately hasn't been that relevant.Twitter isn't as speedy, but at least I'm getting relevant answers.Where do you ask most questions online? Man or machine? Twitter or Google? Or somewhere else entirely?






