| Using Google to Find Management Accounting Information August 26, 2003 Section 1. Purpose. The Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) has e-mail exchanges for members. At these e-mail exchanges, members can post questions in hopes that other members will provide answers. I have been a participant in these exchanges for the last few years. Since I began the Management Accounting Information Center (MAIC) in January 2003, I have responded to exchange member questions when the requests have not already been adequately responded to by other members and when I am able to find Internet sites, using the MAIC, that have relevant information. These responses fulfill exactly what I believe the purpose of the Management Accounting Information Center is intended to be – a site that management accountants can use to search and research the Internet to find information they need. The Management Accounting Information Center uses a “directory approach” to finding Internet sites with needed information. Twenty-eight broad topics, believed to cover most areas of interest to management accountants, are presented on the MAIC front page. To get to an Internet site with relevant information, the user needs to select, from the front page, one of these 28 topics that best fits the information needed. Making a selection will take the user to “subjects” within the major topic area. The user then needs to select a subject that fits his or her informational needs. Clicking on a “Subject” will link to a website. Only if a "subject” exists that relates to the needed information will the MAIC be of any value to the user. I spend a lot of time searching for Internet sites that have relevant information for management accountants, and, therefore, can be added as links at the MAIC. Currently, 736 links exist to sites. The policy of the MAIC is to continue to search for new sites and to increase the number of links. Does this “directory approach” to setting up a website for management accountants to find Internet sites make sense when search engines, such as Goggle, exist? Answering this question is one of the purposes of this article. A second question (and purpose), assuming the answer to the first question is yes, is how should Google be used, in conjunction with the MAIC, to find sites? In the next section, details about the setting up of the evaluation to answer these questions are presented. Then, in Section 3, data found during the evaluation is presented. Section 4 presents answers to the two questions asked in the previous paragraph. Section 2. Setting Up for Answers to Section 1’s Questions. To better determine value the MAIC “directory approach” has for finding relevant Internet sites, compared to using only a search engine, such as Google, 42 responses I made on the IMA e-mail exchanges from June 15, 2003 to August 21, 2003 were selected for evaluation. For each of these responses, I was able to include at least one link to an Internet site evaluated as containing relevant information to the question that was posted to the IMA e-mail exchange. Also, for each response, I only used the MAIC and its “directory approach” to find Internet sites. I did not do any Google searches. I have a record of all responses that I made. I believe that the sites that I sent in these 42 responses do contain relevant information to the questions being answered. I believe I am very selective, include a site only if it is relevant, and screen out sites that are not relevant. For example, during this period (June 15 to August 21), I tried and could not find, relevant sites for seven exchange requests and provided no sites for these seven requests. Also, for the 42 responses that I am analyzing in this article, I received 11 replies from the questioners reflecting approval about the sites I selected. There were no messages reflecting disapproval. An important objective to meet, I think, with respect to the results in this article, is that I am consistent in both the MAIC and Google site selections. I believe that I have been consistent in these selections. One thing that this article does not attempt to do is to evaluate or compare time used to find relevant information – the efficiency of the search. Efficiency is not considered in this article. The criterion that is used in the results presented in this article is the relevancy of the site’s information – the effectiveness of the search. With the 42 MAIC question and response records, I went to Google and ran searches seeking relevant sites for the same 42 questions. Section 3 presents the results. Section 3. Results. Fifty-eight sites were found using the MAIC for the 42 requests. Google found 70 relevant sites for the 42 requests. Ten of the Google 42 searches found a "same" site that was found in the MAIC searches. Therefore, Google found 60 sites that were not found in the MAIC searches (70 total sites less the 10 "same" sites). The MAIC searches found 48 total sites not found using Google (58 sites found less the 10 "same" sites that Google found). Seven MAIC searches (16% of the total 42)) did not find any sites (these are the seven non-responses referred to in Section 2 above). Google found no sites in 11 searches (or 26% of total 42). In three searches (7%), neither the MAIC nor Google found relevant sites. In 8 searches (19%), the MAIC found relevant sites, when Google found nothing, and in 4 searches (9%), Google found relevant sites when no sites were found using the MAIC. Please click here to go to the next and final page. |