> it's not about the information, but the skills required to find it
Absolutely, and I'll add that it's about finding high-quality information. Anyone can find stuff of unknown provenance and accuracy in a moment, but finding accurate, valuable (expert) knowledge often is impossible or exceptionally time-consuming, and often I lack the expertise to evaluate what I'm reading.
I'll just throw an idea out here: I'd love a search engine built by librarians, only of credible, valuable sources. I don't mean recreating a curated listing of links, like old Yahoo, but a curated search index built of only credible sites: For example, Nature, Science, the NY Times Science section, and the like (other journals, etc.), not influencers blogging and YouTubing their opinions (that includes excluding Hacker News), or even casual blogs of experts. Yes, you'd miss some things, but I usually don't need to see everything, just something - imagine doing a search and knowing everything you find will be credible, expert information. (It could also be a big help with the disinformation curse.)
Is it feasible? I think yes: The curators would only have to make decisions site-by-site, not article-by-article, and only once for each site. Most high-credibility sites in any field are well-known, at least to practitioners, and there aren't that many of them.
I think the main problem with this approach is the UX: that all the things we want useful information to be are pretty hard to do in a text search phrase: What makes librarians so great is that you don't walk up and just say "Byzantine empire tax rates" to them, you have a conversation about what you're trying to do, with tons of context, and all their amazing experience.
Good point and I do use it, but it's not a good match for these purposes and especially for the general public:
It's limited to scholarly papers and those have limited domains (in topics and in currency of information - limited current events, for example). Also, GS omits much that is high quality, even the news sections of Nature and Science (and other journals, I expect), the NY Times news, the BBC news (not the opinion sections), Consumer Reports, online exhibitions from credible institutions (e.g., Smithsonian), research from credible think tanks, etc. Finally, availability, accessibility and quality are poor: GS requires much more effort than standard search engines to obtain applicable search results and then to obtain the papers, many scholarly papers can be difficult to read for general audiences, and without expertise it is difficult for people to distinguish fringe papers from one person from consensus from laws of nature.
In my vision, scholarly papers would be listed in a separate box in the UI, for people who want to read them and to remind everyone else that they are available. I'm afraid if the general public got search results that had some papers at the top, it would turn them off.
Absolutely, and I'll add that it's about finding high-quality information. Anyone can find stuff of unknown provenance and accuracy in a moment, but finding accurate, valuable (expert) knowledge often is impossible or exceptionally time-consuming, and often I lack the expertise to evaluate what I'm reading.
I'll just throw an idea out here: I'd love a search engine built by librarians, only of credible, valuable sources. I don't mean recreating a curated listing of links, like old Yahoo, but a curated search index built of only credible sites: For example, Nature, Science, the NY Times Science section, and the like (other journals, etc.), not influencers blogging and YouTubing their opinions (that includes excluding Hacker News), or even casual blogs of experts. Yes, you'd miss some things, but I usually don't need to see everything, just something - imagine doing a search and knowing everything you find will be credible, expert information. (It could also be a big help with the disinformation curse.)
Is it feasible? I think yes: The curators would only have to make decisions site-by-site, not article-by-article, and only once for each site. Most high-credibility sites in any field are well-known, at least to practitioners, and there aren't that many of them.