Michael Gorman, the new President of the American Library Association (ALA), is at it again. In an interview for the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals he expresses several more of what the interviewer describes as:

“robust opinions, untrammelled by lip service to what in Britain passes for political correctness … gloriously oblivious to the likely consequences of his forthright utterances – with the result that his writing, and his speech, are peppered with aphoristic comments.”

One such is:

“Google cannot do what it claims because, in the end, it relies on the mass searching of free texts, and anyone who has studied indexing knows that efficient retrieval systems of any size must have controlled vocabularies. Lacking the latter, the searcher is doomed to more and more hits in no particular order and of marginal or no relevance.”

Aphoristic or just plain daft and ungrammatical? What Google claims (not “in the end” but as its raison d’etre) is to search a mass of free texts of huge proportions efficiently – and it does so; and anyone who has studied indexing knows that a retrieval system of this size cannot possibly “have” a controlled vocabulary – that’s why we need efficient web search engine technolgies.