I do think that Google becomes paradoxically less useful as it gets more effective, but not because other websites are displacing it. I'll use a personal anecdo

I do think that Google becomes paradoxically less useful as it gets more effective, but not because other websites are displacing it. I'll use a personal anecdote to explain what I mean, though I acknowledge that not everyone shares my situation. In college, I used Google for 90% of my assigned research papers. I would rattle off questions, fetch some quotes and start synthesizing them into my writing. The other 10% of the time, I had professors who required book sources and sometimes ask me to bring the books to class. Retrieving book sources always seemed like a pain in the ass. It required the labor of traveling to the campus library, finding a call #, etc. But a certain perk went along with all that labor: I was much more strategic and deliberate in my research. When you don't have an instant answer machine at your finger tips, you have to plot your course more carefully. Interestingly, in my case, I spent about the same amount of time doing library research as I did using Google, even though Google should have been much faster in theory. I was very impulsive and non-strategic in how I used Google to gather information. This is my shortcoming, of course, but I think Google enables it - more so as it becomes faster and more effective in returning information.