Nice take on google (appeared circa 1996) and libraries in Star Telegram:

"For a lot of kids today, the world started in 1996," says librarian and author Gary Price.

Library circulation dropped about 20 percent at major universities in the first five years after Internet search engines became popular.

A generation ago, reference librarians were the most powerful search engines on the planet. But the rise of robotic search engines in the mid-1990s has removed the human mediators between researchers and information. Librarians are not so sure they approve. Much of the material on the World Wide Web is wrong, or crazy, or of questionable provenance, or simply out of date.

"How do you authenticate what you're looking at?" asks librarian Patricia Wand of American University.

Students typically search only the most obvious parts of the Web and rarely venture into what is sometimes called the "Dark Web," the walled gardens of information accessible only through specific databases, such as Lexis-Nexis or the Oxford English Dictionary. And most old books remain undigitized.

So where are we heading to? Smarter search engine? New ways to authenticate content ?...