Turns out, there are benefits which go beyond that. A recent and thought-provoking Science article (“Electronic Publishing and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship”) shows that as library search has gotten vastly more efficient with the advent of digitized libraries and online search tools, the depth of scientific research has suffered. Scholars in a variety of fields tend to reference fewer articles and cast a narrower net when conducting their background research.

The old, inefficient search method, which relied on index cards and inevitably entailed flipping through pages of not necessarily relevant journals, had the benefit of exposing scientists to a wider range of ideas, which could potentially also widen the scope of their research. This kind of serendipity can turn out to be a vastly more valuable consequence of search diversion than stumbling upon new products at the supermarket or while browsing aimlessly through Amazon.com.

I have noticed this in legal research as well. There is a lot of stuff available on the free internet, but a much broader, deeper set of information through paid services such as Lexis. It’s easy to think that you are finding everything relevant through the many free search results on Google, but that is not correct.