Googling

I learned something from:
Cohen, J. (2026, June 19). Google's AI Overviews Aren't Going Anywhere. But I Figured Out How to Hide Them. https://uk.pcmag.com/ai/152436/google-ai-overviews-arent-going-anywhere-4-tricks-to-hide-them (although the 4th tip is basically "use a different search engine"). These tips have become more useful because ...
Perez, S. (2026, May 19). Google Search as you know it is over. Techcrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/ - also ...
- Perez, S. (2026, July 6). If you use Google, you’re training its AI. Here’s how to opt out. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/06/if-you-use-google-youre-training-its-ai-heres-how-to-opt-out/
Image created using Midjourney AI

Google: liable for fakery; cannabilising

A couple of items of news and opinion about Google. Firstly a court in Germany has ruled that although Google has previously been found not responsible for incorrect information in its search results, it is liable for misleading and defamatory information in AI summaries. 
"Because the AI summarizes results in its own words, evaluates their content, and presents them in a structured format, the judges ruled that Google creates entirely new, independent statements that go beyond mere links." 
Connor, R. (2026, May 12). German court holds Google liable for fake AI answers. Deutsche Welle. https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-holds-google-liable-for-fake-ai-answers/a-77527661?

Then a perspective from the Register on Google search
Claburn, T. (2026, May 25). Google is cannibalizing the web to feed AI. The Register. https://www.theregister.com/ai-ml/2026/05/25/google-is-cannibalizing-the-web-to-feed-ai/5244641 Subtitle "Google Search used to direct users to web sites; AI Mode will keep them in Google's garden" 
Photo by Sheila Webber: Let's think of chocoloate, rather than of how Google has declined; Lindt world of chocolate, May 2026

A Taxonomy of LLM Summarisation in Academic Search

An interesting categorisation of the different ways in which different types of large language models (LLMs) summarise outputs from academic search tools:

Tay, A. (2026, January 24). Classifying the Ways LLMs Summarise in Academic Search: Understanding AI Summaries in EBSCO, ProQuest, and More. https://aarontay.substack.com/p/classifying-the-ways-llms-summarise
Photo by Sheila Webber: war memorial, Sheffield, February 2026

National Searching Guidance - latest edition

The National Searching Guidance for NHS/healthcare libarians has been updated and the January 2026 edition is available.  As with previous editions, it starts with guidance for each stage of an evidence search (i.e. planning, execution, results). Although the focus is on searches related to health, these general guidelines and prompts are more widely useful. Following general guidance on each stage of a search are sections with detailed guidance for specific types of search.
It can be accessed freely on the Searching and Training Forums' wiki at https://sites.google.com/site/healthliteraturesearchers/Home
Photo by Sheila Webber: misty day, December 2025

Recent articles: Students using TikTok and ChatGPT for information

 - Brookbank, E. (2025). Is TikTok the new Google? How college students use TikTok to search for information. The Reference Librarian, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/02763877.2025.2554874   
- Shuhas, E. & Forte, A. (2025). ChatGPT is actually my friend: Understanding the information behavior of university students interacting with AI chatbots. In Companion Publication of the 2025 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW Companion '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. (pp.282–287). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715070.3749239
Photo by Sheila Webber: Christmas wreath at number 23, December 2025

Faculty Views on Generative AI Tools – Case: Primo Research Assistant #ECIL2025

This is Sheila liveblogging from the ECIL Conference again on Faculty Views on Generative AI Tools – Case: Primo Research Assistant, presented by Riikka Sinisalo and Essi Prykäri (LUT University, Finland). They explained that PRIMO research assistant provides a summary of 5 articles with the inline references. Users can ask questions in languages other than English and it does machine translations. They have renamed the tool as "AI Assistant".
The library did a survey about Primo Research Assistant with faculty, with only 26 respondents. Most people agreed it was easy to use, a majority agreed that it would be useful for their own work, and that it would be useful for students. In open ended questions revealed that faculty that most would recommend the tool to the student and most had tested other AI tools. Other comments included stating that using AI searching needed support and that there was question whether poor results were a problem of the searcher or the tool. Respondents emphasised that students need to read articles, do summaries and be critical - so if learners are too reliant on AI tools they will not develop this understanding themselves. Also respondents noted that it was unclear how the articles were chosen.
To follow up on this they interviewed four faculty members. The themes echoed what was said in the survey. The AI Tool was seen as useful for quick or starting searches, but more thorough search would be needed. The follow up quesries which are generated by the AI Tools were seen as useful. Having just 5 articles was seen as useful in an age of information overload.
The interviewees noted that some essential sources were missed by the tool, Finnish sources were neglected, and translations English-Finnish had some problems. There were concerns about "outsourcing" information searching - outsourcing cognitive functions that people need to develop. There were discussion as to who should teach AI skills - librarians? or would it just be just picked up?
The interviewees had not so many concerns about students using summaries directly in their work - they were more worried about other researchers doing so.
The library launched the tool in mid-August 2025, and so far it is used less than basic search but more than advanced search. The librarians think they need to provide more information on limitations, features such as machine translation (and problems with searching in Finnish), and on biases etc. They finished with a quote from a respondenet  "AI is here to stay, so there's no point pretending that we could continue business as usual going forward"

AI tools for academic libraries

AI Tools for Academic Libraries "is a bimonthly series from the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) and Choice (part of ACRL) that explores specific categories of AI tools through concise, practical evaluations." You can sign up for a newsletter. The first installment has concise critical reviews of: Ex Libris’s Primo Research Assistant; Elicit; Perpexity AI; Research Rabbit; Semantic Scholar.
https://www.choice360.org/libtech-insight/ai-tools-for-academic-libraries-ai-research-assisants/
Photo by Sheila Webber: birds on the wire, Gothenburg, August 2025

Impact of Google AI summaries

An article from Pew Research Center summarising results from one of their reports: they captured (with permission) search histories from 900 people, to see what the pattern was when there was an AI-generated summary from a search. Basically, "For searches that resulted in an AI-generated summary, users very rarely clicked on the sources cited". Also "Google users are more likely to end their browsing session entirely after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary". This is the article:
Chapekis, A. & Lieb, A. (2025, July 22). Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/
This is the original (May 2025) report: What Web Browsing Data Tells Us About How AI Appears Online https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2025/05/23/what-web-browsing-data-tells-us-about-how-ai-appears-online/ (the full methodology is on the third page)
This is the article that gave me the link to the Pew report: it has useful discussion of how this lack of click-through is affecting news/information sites (there are a lot of ads on the page btw):
Uren, C. (2025, August 3). Google AI summary feature deals blow to link clicks and website traffic. Euro News. https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/08/03/google-ai-summary-feature-deals-blow-link-clicks-and-website-traffic
Photo by Sheila Webber: front door, July 2025

Presentations from LOEX: information literacy; AI; teaching

Some of the presentations and materials from the 2025 LOEX (US information literacy) conference are available. It was held 15-17 May 2025 and the theme was Crafting a Future for Information Literacy. The presentations are listed alphabetically by title and you can see which ones have links to material. Numerous interesting items, I will just pick out 4 that caught my eye:
- The Lost Art of Skilled Belief: Rebalancing Our Approach to Information Literacy from Kate Wimer (George Fox University, USA) (Presentation, Activity materials, Further reading)
- Assessing the Quality of the Primo AI Research Assistant for Use in Library Instruction and Research Consultations from Crystal Goldman and Dominique Turnbow (UC San Diego, USA) (Presentation)
- Who's Afraid of Little Old AI? Using an AI Literacy Framework to Create an Instruction Session from Sandy Hervieux and Amanda Wheatley (McGill University, Canada) (Presentation, Handout, Template, Activity materials, Further reading)
- Creating a Necklace from a Pile of Beads: Crafting Impactful Library Instruction with Interpretive Communication by Elizabeth C. Bittner (University of Texas at Arlington, USA) (presentation)
Go to https://loexconference.org/breakout-session-materials/
Photo by Sheila Webber: wisteria in bloom, and chimney detail, May 2025

New articles: AI overviews; ACRL Framework; AI resistance

The latest issue of open-access College & Research Libraries News (Vol 86, No 5, 2025) includes
- Google AI Overviews Are Here to Stay: A Call to Teach AI Literacy by Tessa Withorn
- AI in Academic Libraries, Part Two: Resistance and the Search for Ethical Uses by Ruth Monnier, Matthew Noe, Ella Gibson
- ACCentuating Epistemology in the ACC Frame: A Case for Integrating Personal and Discipline-Specific Epistemologies into the ACRL Framework by Brynne Campbell Rice, Nicole Helregel
Go to https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/issue/view/1677/showToc
Photo by Sheila Webber: Hellebores (I think) at Sheffield Botanics, May 2025

Place of googling in writing news stories

Rupar, V., Myllylahti, M., Jones, H-G., Li, W., Mohaghegh, M. & Parisa, P. (2022). Googling it: While news search results can affect newsrooms’ perception of social issues, journalists mainly rely on it for complementary information. Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, 13(3), 253-273. https://doi.org/10.1386/iscc_00064_1 (open access).
I thought this was interesting as evidence in the scope of online news coverage sourced via search engines, as well as giving insights into journalistic practice "Our study highlights the significant role of search engines, particularly Google, in shaping the journalistic newsgathering process and, consequently, public understanding of social issues. The computer-assisted analysis of Google’s ‘recession’ news selection revealed distinct patterns in the distribution of news content and geographical bias towards the United States within the selection algorithm. Ethnographic research at one Auckland newsroom revealed that Google Search is a fundamental tool for journalists, albeit used primarily for basic information-gathering and fact-checking rather than in-depth investigative work." (NB, although the "publication date" is 2022, it says the article was actually received in 2024, and this is the latest issue of the journal).
Photo by Sheila Webber: the crocus circle, March 2025

AI performance at citing news

Jaźwińska, K. & Chandrasekar, A. (2025, March 6). AI Search Has A Citation Problem. Columbia Journalism Review. https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/we-compared-eight-ai-search-engines-theyre-all-bad-at-citing-news.php Spoiler alert "We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News."
"We randomly selected ten articles from each publisher, then manually selected direct excerpts from those articles for use in our queries. After providing each chatbot with the selected excerpts, we asked it to identify the corresponding article’s headline, original publisher, publication date, and URL" They were excerpts that would have found the right item with a Google search.
Also, this caught my eye: Scott, L. (2025, March 18). The Last Days at Voice of America. Columbia Journalism Review. https://www.cjr.org/first_person/last-days-voice-of-america-voa-trump-kari-lake.php
Photo by Sheila Webber: a few crocuses, March 2025

SearchGPT: the next step

An interesting post from Phil Bradley about SearchGPT and how he sees it affecting search and search engines. You should be able to read this without logging into LinkedIn (though if you aren't you will have to click your way past a notice).
Bradley, P. (2024, July 27). SearchGPT; the next step. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/searchgpt-next-step-phil-bradley-jrxze/

This is an article by him from earlier in the month:
Bradley, P. (2024, June 4). The changing face of internet search. Information Today. https://www.infotoday.eu/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/The-changing-face-of-internet-search-164285.aspx?

Photo by Sheila Webber: Stanley Park, Vancouver, May 2024

Is the world’s biggest search engine broken?

An interesting read for Saturday:
Faber, T. 92024, 20 July). ‘Google says I’m a dead physicist’: is the world’s biggest search engine broken?. Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/20/google-is-the-worlds-biggest-search-engine-broken
Image created by Sheila Webber using Midjourney AI with prompt: Is the world’s biggest search engine broken? google --v 6.0 --ar 16:9

Recording: Prompt engineering in libraries

There was a webinar on Prompt engineering in libraries: some early observations on12 June 2024, in which Liam Bullingham, Oona Ylinen, and Beth Burnet from the University of Essex, UK, shared some  reflections on engineering prompts for generative AI in libraries. The recording is here https://youtu.be/JUEUkMz_ibo?si=WKoglGTMnXB2SjbM
Photo by Sheila Webber: white climbing roses, May 2024.

Information about war; Children and Google; ChatGPT

Three articles, on varied information literacy topics:

Del Castillo, M.S. & Kelly, H.Y. (2024). ChatGPT is a Liar and other Lessons Learned from Information Literacy Instructors [Conference presentation]. ALA 2024 LibLearnX Conference, Baltimore, MD, United States. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1161&context=glworks (Slides plus what was posted to a padlet by delegates)

Lauren N. Girouard-Hallam, Judith H. Danovitch (2024). How does Google get its information?: Children's judgements about Google search. British Journal of Developmental Psychology [early online publication]. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjdp.12487 "American children ages 9 and 10 (n = 44; 18 boys and 26 girls) viewed factual questions directed towards Google or a person. After viewing each question, they reported their confidence in the informant's accuracy, the time it would take the informant to obtain the answer and how the informant would obtain the answer. Finally, they generated questions that the internet would be capable or incapable of answering. Children believed Google would be more accurate and faster than a person at answering questions. Children consistently generated appropriate questions that the internet would be good at answering, but they sometimes struggled to generate questions that the internet would not be good at answering. Implications for children's learning are discussed." 

Corbu, N., Udrea, G., Buturoiu, R., & Negrea-Busuioc, E. (2024). Navigating the information environment about the Ukraine war. Convergence, [early online publication]. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241247412 "In this context, we investigate what make people correctly recognize accurate information and detect misinformation about the war at the beginning of the conflict in Romania, a bordering country. By means of a national survey (N = 1006) conducted in April-May 2022, we looked for predictors of people’s capacity of navigating the information environment about the conflict. Data was gathered via an online panel conducted by Kantar as part of a cross-country project implemented in 19 countries. Findings show that people are relatively good at discerning between correct and misleading statements about the war. Prior negative attitudes about the Ukraine invasion, the level of concern about the war, not having a conspiracy mindset, self-perceived media literacy, and the extent to which people believe fact-checks to be effective in fighting misinformation are all predictors of the accuracy of misinformation detection of the respondents. These results offer insights into how ideologically based/motivated misinformation could be countered in a war crisis context, in a country bordering the conflict."
Photo by Sheila Webber: forget-me-not - it really was this blue! April 2024

Using Early Responses to Wikipedia and Google to Consider ChatGPT #ECIL2023

At the ECIL conference (Sheila here) I just attended a talk on Using Early Responses to Wikipedia and Google to Consider ChatGPT by David A. Hurley (University of New Mexico, USA). He identified a number of questions that are being asked about generative AI, such as: where is the authority? what should be the heuristics for assessment? should we teach prompt engineering? should we prohibit students from using AI? Hurley identified the similarity between these fears and questions, and the questions raised on the introduction of Google/the web and Wikipedia.
Hurley had done a search for commentary on Google and Wikipedia to identify how they were being talked about when they were introduced. For example in 1999 Google was still being talked about as something you may not have heard of. Hurley identified the number of workshops, advice about how to search it well, noting structural issues (such as the way in which popular pages get brought to the top, and implications of that). As I was giving frequent workshops about how to search search engines at that time I got quite excited at this point.
Hurley noticed that catastrophising that went on, and there were also debates about the issues around having one interface to multiple databases, and the impact of users not having to make so much effort to search. Hurley identified librarians seeing critical evaluation of information being less central to information literacy. Hurley referred to A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto and had found references to Wikipedia being framed as evil, not just unreliable. Hurley identified three pedagogical approaches
(1) Rejection (e.g. notices forbidding Wikipedia use; exercises designed to show Wikipedia/Google were not as good as books and journals);
(2) Reinforcing - incorporating Google/Wikipedia into existing ways of teaching (e.g. using poor websites to teach information evaluation)
(3) Revolutionising e.g. using Wikipedia's talk pages to show a process of consensus; encouraging students to edit Wikipedia entries. There were also more questionable activities involving spreading misinformation.
Hurley noted that some of the early criticisms no longer apply e.g. it indexes pdfs etc. that were originally not accessible, also the criticism that "Google doesn't give you an answer" and "Google doesn't know you like a librarian does" are no longer true (indeed the idea that Google doesn't know you raised laughter in the room). Differences to this earlier time include:
That Google/Wikipedia were more democratising - anyone can edit and create; however ChatGPT is centralising.
On Wikipedia/Google you can usually see who has written something and when; In ChatGPT the origins and authors are submerged.
There is a different user context: whereas in the early days of Google etc. librarians were the search experts, now that has changed - librarians may not be the best prompt engineers.
There is a different environmental context, with more awareness of the impact of these tools. Conclusions included - not to confuse curiosity with a mandate to teach; scope for collaborative exploration (with students) of these tools. 

This was part of a session on algorithmic literacy: the abstracts for the session are here. Unfortunately I missed most of the first two talks, but you can see the informative abstract on Algorithms, Digital Literacies and Democratic Practices: Perceptions of Academic Librarians by Maureen Constance Henninger, Hilary Yerbury and Algorithmic Literacy of Polish Students in Social Sciences and Humanities and Łukasz Iwasiński, Magdalena Krawczyk from that link above I will mention that the in the latter talk, the researchers were using Dogruel et al's(2022)  scale, and they identified that some items on the algorithm literacy scale were unclear e.g. "Humans are never involved when algorithms are used" and so they recommend reviewing these questions and adding some examples. Also the researchers felt that an algorithm literacy scale should not be restricted to considering algorithm literacy in the internet. They thought that it would be better to take the Framework catalogue of digital competencies and add items to do with algorithm literacy. You identify area of life/benefit/competency needed to achieve the benefit.
Reference: Dogruel, L., Masur P., & Joeckel, S. (2022) Development and validation of an algorithm literacy scale for internet users. Communication Methods and Measures, 16(2).
Photo by Sheila Webber window in Krakow

Visualizing Online Search Processes for Information Literacy Education #ECIL2023

The final presentation I (Sheila) will be blogging from this morning was Visualizing Online Search Processes for Information Literacy Education was presented by Luca Botturi – a presentation co-authored with Loredana Addimando, Martin Hermida and Chiara Beretta. Botturi talked about their project LOIS which had 500+ school student participants. The students were presented with scenarios, for example one where a friend is worried about eating pesto because they have heard basil causes cancer. The researchers asked participants to share their search logs, as well as recording their thoughts about the success of the search.
The researchers used visual methods so they could inspect the research stories and also because they could be useful for teaching information literacy. The visualisation includes notation for length of time doing different actions, what the actions are such as reading, searching, searching for the same word, clicking on a hit. The visualisations show that some people search for the same word again and again, others a different word each time, some spend a long time reading and never click on a hit: so the stories for the same scenario can be very different. However, in broad terms, 40% just type in a question, tinker with it, find an answer and select it. They are displayed in such a way that you can work through each search story seeing what is done.
Once the students have done these searches, they are asked to reflect on what they’ve done and they can see what others have done. The students were very satisfied with this activity: the the students with higher academic performance and those who found searching easy rated the activity higher. Concerning were those students who identified that they had learned more about searching but didn’t intend to change their behaviour.
- The researchers identified five guidelines
- There is no best online search method
- Everyone has one or two preferred search practices
- A poor search can be worse than no search
- Search tasks matter and are not all alike
- Effective online searching takes learning 

They will be sharing the plugin and the server application that they developed. The next step for them is Reflective Online Search Education (ROSE) currently starting within FNS/Weave programme with the Leibniz Institut, Germany. This will develop ways of using this search story approach, which sounds very interesting.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Art garden, Krakow

#ECIL23 Dictionary Literacy, Information Literacy, and Information Behaviour in the E-Environment

 Theo Bothma and Ina Fourie from university of Pretoria presented about the dictionary literacy skills associated with reading text, and is concerned with understanding the principles of dictionary use, it’s structure, and the abbreviations and labels used in the dictionary. In e-dictionaries this also encompasses search strategies. Theo spoke about some of the challenges in using dictionaries in Kindles, particularly if the word is unusual, and in these cases the user is directed to a Google search which links to the Oxford English Dictionary. However often users are presented with some unsuitable definitions, or ones that are unrelated to their context so must engage with a process of evaluation and sifting. Could generative AI help with the dictionary consultation process? It is possible to enter a piece of text into the AI and ask the system for the meaning of particular words. In the example given, the generative AI did not identify correctly the people and context from the passage. 

#Chatbot Arena

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, USA, are running Chatbot arena. You type your prompt into 2 search boxes, and it runs them against 2 different chatbots. Afterwards it shows the results from the 2 chatbots, asks you to say which results you think are best and tells you which chatbots they were. The chatbots include ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4, Claude-v1 and numerous open source chatbots. Interesting to see the results from 2 chatbots, and also to see what chatbots are available. The arena is at  https://chat.lmsys.org/?arena and the chatboard leaderboard at https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmsys/chatbot-arena-leaderboard. You sometimes have to reload to get access.
Image created by Sheila Webber with Midjourney AI, using prompt: battle arena, cute, fighting chatbots --ar 16:9