Perhaps the bigger illusion is that when you search with Google you are somehow searching the sum total of human knowledge. This is a big pet peeve of mine. P

Perhaps the bigger illusion is that when you search with Google you are somehow searching the sum total of human knowledge. This is a big pet peeve of mine. People think because they're reading the web that they know things or they're "up to date" on current events. I've gotten a lot more out of books than the news, especially in the last 5-10 years. And I feel like that's almost universally true (bad books are still better!) Ironically Google Scholar is one place that you will find some real information. But it seems to be de-emphasized now. The main Google results will take you to a paywall for a paper (IEEE, etc.) But if you go to Google Scholar, you'll find the PDF. But I'd bet many Google users don't know that, even the ones that would read a journal paper. ----- Aside from that, this is a great article that makes a great point. Google talks about AI all the time but it still relies on basic user curation to understand the web. I think that shows you that the value lies. If webmasters stop doing work, then Google has nothing to index. Similarly I view the rise of these awesome lists as a manual Yahoo: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome If Google was providing so much value, then these lists would be redundant. In fact I think Google was bootstrapped off at least partially off Yahoo. Yahoo had all these human editors curating links. That was great information for a nascent search engine to piggy back off of. Now that Yahoo no longer does that (AFAIK), Google has to rely on incentives for webmasters to provide metadata. ----- To add something positive, I think YouTube is really where there is interesting user created content. Google has done a good job of stewarding and growing that ecosystem. I remember I used to type random keywords in to Google and see what comes up. It used to be something interesting; it no longer is. But YouTube has that flavor now. I typed in "sardines" and got a channel of this funny guy reviewing all sorts of canned fish :) It feels more like the early web.