[Barrin92]

Given that Google is one of the, if not the single most important window to all internet content I don't think that is an acceptable status quo or a sufficient explanation.

Surely if we use search engines most of us try to obtain relevant and factual information about the world, instead of trying to get some tautological answer out of the engine.

The comparison here to journalism is apt. Technically, journalists could simply declare everything to be the mere invention of the journalist's mind, but we don't think that's acceptable for a lot of good reasons.

[VikingCoder]

Actually, the comparison to Librarians is more apt.

If you want to find a book declaring that vaccines cause autism, you can find that book.

Google tries really hard to have the Card Catalog system be as good as possible, but "solving" that problem is basically impossible.

[Barrin92]

I don't think that comparison is going to go over well for Google though, because we actually do curate contents in libraries and personally assist you in finding the right source for whatever information you seek.

That is what a librarian does, one of the oldest and in many cultures respected professions you can choose. In contrast to Google, which might give you wild conspiracy theories about vaccines on page 1, with no help or indication whatsoever that something funky is going on, a library actually personally assists you.

If Google was a library then that library would have no employees. The books would initially all lie around randomly, and whenever you want a book, you simply shout into the library, and some guy randomly throws 20 books at you. If you take one of the books the next time, the chance will be higher that someone else gets that book as well. Let me just say that I don't think that it would be a great library experience, especially if you try to fit the entire worlds information into a single one.