Price, Gary WEBMASTRY SEARCHER Vol. 11 No. 10 Nov/Dec 2003

Google gave its users a sense that it was a “people” type of product. From day one, it created an image of being cool to use.

Sad but true, libraries and librarians have quite the opposite effect on many people particularly those with no clue of what the librarian of 2003 is all about. What have we done to change these ideas?

Unfortunately, not enough.

While this “Googlefication” was going on, information professionals, as a group, didn’t speak loudly enough to tell people that Google is just the tip of the iceberg and that Web searching has many limitations, depending on your information needs.

This article compares the rise of Google as the premier information retreival method with the growing invisibility of libraries in the public mind.