Lately Google has been adding features, such as its Preferred Sites or SearchWiki, that enable users to narrow in on the one result they want even better, or to promote or demote sites in their own future searches. These features will clearly help users find the needle in the haystack, but as they get better for this purpose, we should not expect them to also improve our ability to characterize a whole set of web documents. Here’s an example where searching for the needle can be limiting:  Academics are in the business of pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge. But if you don’t know where the boundaries of knowledge are, its easy to spend a great deal of time reinventing wheels and all manner of other existing technology.

So you’d think that the advent of search engines (including academic search engines like Google Scholar) would make our jobs much easier — and they undoubtedly do in some ways. But here’s the risk: there’s been some evidence lately that these search engines have caused academics to read and cite fewer articles (i.e., only those that appear at the top of search results) and for our articles to be less comprehensive overall.  There’s an ongoing debate about this evidence in academic and technology circles, but you can see how it might happen.  Search engines are about searching for one item; we shouldn’t expect them to be as good at describing the haystack as they are at serving up needles.

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