This commentary, Search Engines Make Us Dumb, no doubt reflects the perspective of many seasoned online (pre-Web) researchers. There is a steadily growing reliance, among consumers and professionals in many communities, on search engines (or just Google for that matter) as the penultimate tool to search, locate, and analyze data which is then disseminated as the answer to a specified query.
According to the article’s author: “We, not search engines, have the ability to search, i.e. to contextualise entities, to perceive and react to an innate taxonomy of our natural language, to rank according to a variety of intangible criteria.”