Course in googling comes to UW Seattle LIS department

By Cory Doctorow at 8:53 am Monday, Feb 2

The UW Seattle Library and Information Science program is offering a course in Google -- in Microsoft's back-yard, no less, and just a few days since Bill Gates said that MSFT was going to un-break its search offerings:

'Our strategy was to do a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignore the other stuff,' he said. But 'it's the remaining 20 percent that counts,' he added, 'because that's where the quality perception is.'

This was by far the most interesting thing I've read about Google in 2004: the value proposition is in the 20 percent that represents the least-frequent queries in the service. It's the same reason that PirateNapster, with millions of songs (most of which you didn't care about) was a million times better than LegitNapster, with a few hundred thousand songs, most of which you can hear by turning on the radio. It's the difference between an ASCII ebook that you can print of turn into a PDF or run through text-to-speech or any of a million tasks that most of us don't care about and a frozen ebook in a DRM format that you can only use in the ways that the publisher's research has indicated are most popular. Link (via Battelle)