What Do You Need to Know to Use a Search Engine? Why We Still Need to Teach Research Skills

For the vast majority of queries (for example, navigation, simple fact lookup, and others), search engines do extremely well. They also highlight many of the issues that are common to sophisticated AI question-answering systems. Rapid and ready-at-hand access, depth of processing, and the way they enable people to offload some ordinary memory tasks suggest that search engines have become more of a cognitive amplifier than a simple repository or front-end to the Internet. Although search engines are superb at finding and presenting information--up to and including extracting complex relations and making simple inferences--knowing how to frame questions and evaluate their results for accuracy and credibility remains an ongoing challenge.