Criticism
Some librarians have criticized Google Answers as a service selling services that are part of the tasks of public librarians (in the United States). The most vocal of these critics was former Google Answers Researcher Jessamyn West, whose contract was terminated after she violated the site's terms of service by publishing an article about her experience as a Google Answers Researcher. Other reference librarians claimed that the service was not detrimental to libraries, but simply operated in parallel to them.
Other critics claimed that the service encourages plagiarism. The official Google Answers policy was to remove questions that appeared to be school assignments. However, some journalists expressed concerns that sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between a "legitimate" question and a homework assignment, especially in regard to sciences and programming.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)