Best 'search engine': Librarians!

I hope this doesn't come as a surprise: Librarians are even more irreplaceable now than before the Web came along. Why? Because we are increasingly awash in information, which requires increasingly critical thinking. Librarians are critical thinkers extraordinaire. They're media literacy experts. They can help you search the Web intelligently and also find books (remember those?) and other reference and media materials that just might have more than a Web site can offer. Besides, CNET reports, most Web researchers rely on the info they get in the top few search results. For example, if you search for "Martin Luther King" in three of the most high-traffic search engines, you get the site of a white supremacist group in the first or second results. So, if a librarian isn't handy, here are some resources that they'd probably recommend, CNET reports: Librarians Internet Index ("Web sites you can trust"), and The Internet Public Library, and Infomine ("Scholarly Internet Resource Collections") at the University of California, Riverside. BTW, here are CNET's "Top 10 Research Tools."