The Librarian

I grew up in a pre-internet world. If I needed to research something for a school project, my only real option was asking my mum for a lift to the local village library.

Our library was pretty small, an old Victorian building with a pretty limited range of options. Finding the answer to a question meant flicking through reference books one after another, scanning indexes, and hoping one of the limited books on offer had what you needed. Sometimes you found the answer. Sometimes you didn’t, and you’d have to visit a larger library, usually in the local town. Frustrating for sure, but it often led to the discovery of interesting topics unrelated to what you’d gone in for, just from running your finger along the spines on the shelves.

Looking back now, with everything we’ve seen since, I find myself torn. The internet changed everything. For a while, it changed things for the better. It was an open standard that belonged to no one: everyone got equal access to publish and to discover. The early search engines and directories that emerged to make sense of it all were rubbish half the time, but they were at least pointing at a web that was still genuinely wild, not yet chasing your click. You could stumble across a hand-built site about something wonderfully obscure, because nobody had worked out how to monetise your attention yet.

That era is long gone. PPC advertising had already wrecked genuine discovery in Google Search years before AI entered the picture. And now, with third-party cookies blocked as a genuine tracking mechanism, the logical next move for Google is to bring you inside: build a walled garden around the information you need, serve you answers directly, and watch how you consume them.

Google’s about page still reads: “Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It’s a compelling line. But this is a commercial product, not a public library. The honest version might read more like: “Our mission is to organize the world’s information (behind a paid advertising network) and make it universally accessible and useful (so long as you’re happy seeing what people pay us to surface).”

I can’t help wondering if this was always the inevitable destination. Google themselves describe their AI-driven shift as “the biggest upgrade to the Search box in 25 years,” powered by increasingly agentic versions of Gemini designed to interpret, reason, and act on our behalf.

Maybe this experience is better for the user, it’s definitely more frictionless.

Thinking back to how I sourced answers as a school child, there’s a part of me that wonders whether I’d have wanted it any other way. Given the option of a personal librarian walking me to the exact book, opening it to the right page, pointing at the paragraph. Would I have taken that? Probably. Convenience typically wins.

But I discovered choose your own adventure books at that library. Never knew they existed, didn’t seek them out, just stumbled across them while looking for something else entirely. That led to a fascination with adventure games, which piqued my interest in interaction design, which shaped a long career in making things with software. None of that was searched for. All of it was accidental.

Google insists that AI Overviews “prominently include links” and that the clicks they send are “higher quality” because the system has already filtered for relevance. But filtering for relevance is precisely the problem. The librarian in this version walks you straight to the right shelf, pulls the (sponsored) book, opens it to the right page, and explains it to you in terms they already know will land, because they’ve been quietly learning how you think. You don’t stumble across anything in a system built like that.

So how will future us discover the things that don’t have a marketing budget, a brand, or the capacity to pay for visibility in AEO? What happens to the quiet corners of the web when the answer arrives before the wandering can begin?

It’s a shift from indexing to interpreting.

There is some undeniable magic in this, but also real risk.

A librarian who chooses what to show you is also choosing what you don’t see. And one who knows you this well isn’t about to challenge what you already think.

Is this the better outcome?

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