How to Turn Google Search into Your Personal Librarian

This article will share some incredibly useful tips from a librarian for how to make your Google searches more helpful and accurate. But before I share their fixes it’s important to remember how we got to a space where we need this advice at all. How did Google go from being a magic portal to all the world’s knowledge to one of the more frustrating tools you use every day?

How did Google search get so frustrating?

The story begins with SEO spam farms. Their low-quality content designed to appeal to bots rather than humans first kicked off a wave of complaints that Google search results were getting noticeably worse.

But it wasn’t just slop. Google also twiddled its algorithms to please advertisers and keep you using the company’s products for longer. So many people howled about the resulting “enshittification” that several organizations named the ungainly term, coined by writer Corey Doctorowtheir word of the year.

Finally the coup de grace—AI overviews. Yes, the little AI summaries at the top of your Google search results are accurate 90 percent of the time, according to a recent New York Times/ Oumi analysis. That’s impressive. But thanks to Google’s scale, that still adds up to an absolute tsunami of misinformation.

Futurism did a little back of the envelope calculating: “With Google processing roughly five trillion searches a year, (90 percent accuracy) translates to tens of millions of wrong answers that the AI Overviews are providing every hour — and hundreds of thousands every minute.”

Add in the fact that studies show fewer than ten percent of people actually check AI answers and you have a recipe for embarrassing errors and mass confusion. No wonder so many of us feel getting accurate, helpful information out of Google these days can be a struggle.

Librarians to the rescue!

So what’s to be done about the general difficulty of finding what you need with Google search and then actually being sure it’s correct? Hopefully smart engineers at the company are fighting to make it easier to unearth reliable, relevant information again. But you don’t have to wait for them to prevail.