He states:
Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing. Nowadays you can’t have a long dinner-table argument about who won the Oscar for that Neil Simon movie where she plays an actress who doesn’t win an Oscar; at any moment someone will pull out a pocket device and Google it. If you need the art-history meaning of “picturesque,” you could find it in The Book of Answers, compiled two decades ago by the New York Public Library’s reference desk, but you won’
Now I grew up in New York and never ever went to the Library. They never had what I wanted. I went to used book stores, you see I wanted to have the information around permanently, not just find some answer, I wanted to know. By the way, my wife worked at the Boston Public Library, and I met her as a librarian, at MIT. But I digress, since she really was the only thing I remember of value there, and I even took her home!
Now in 1972 I believe, MIT tried to move to microfiche, removing journals. I somewhat blew my top, because you see when looking in journals it is often not what you are looking for that stimulates a new idea but what you pass over by happenstance. You see it is what you are able to connect in the context of your own educated and prepared mind that all too often leads to results, not what someone has ordered for you to peruse.
Thus microfiche allowed targeted search. Now the next thing that came along was Dialog, the on line search company. My wonderful wife went to work there for about a decade. In this case you went to the reference librarian trained to use the system and asked for a search, and she would interrogate you and depending on he well the two of you communicated a few days later came a printout. You then read through it to find the papers you wanted and then again in a few days you finally got them. Better than fiche, not really. By the time you got them you often forgot why you even asked.
Now to Google. Google never ever answers my questions. Google just finds what I ask for, a real time version of Dialog, with instant gratification, downloading a pdf set of files that in real time allow a widening or focused search. I can now get a draft book out in six months or less, depending on other factors. Why, because Google facilitated the search. It was a search, guided by my questions, and all Google did was index what others put on the web. Google did not make any value choices. Thus when I seek "cancer stem cell" site:edu filetype:pdf, I get what they have indexed. I then look through a few hundred and build a pile of 30-50 papers which I then read through. Has Google made a value judgement on what I should see? Doubtful, and I would be the ultimate arbiter in the end anyway.
Gleick continues:
Part of Google’s mission is to make the books of answers redundant (and the reference librarians, too).
Well yes the reference librarian is obsolete, thank goodness. Yet I did get a wonderful wife. But I get what I need and more much more efficiently now. Never was my wife's fault. But Google is a "free" Dialog with a better interface.
As for Gleick's inference that somehow Google have evil intents. He states:
The business of finding facts has been an important gear in the workings of human knowledge, and the technology has just been upgraded from rubber band to nuclear reactor. No wonder there’s some confusion about Google’s exact role in that—along with increasing fear about its power and its intentions.
Now frankly how will Google do evil in getting me papers from universities on "cancer stem cells". Perhaps if I wanted a sump pump they would sell me one, as does Amazon. But for true search and find one cannot live without Google. Notwithstanding Gleick's views.
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