Search engines use terms ("search terms") to give you relevant information. Sometimes, this is pretty straightforward. For example, weather CITY will conveniently give you a weekly weather forecast for the place you searched in all major search engines.

Using Search Engines to find this sort of straightforward, homogenous data is fast and easy. Likewise, you can search things like,

• Measurement conversions
• Prices of stocks, cryptocurrencies, etc
• Geographic information, e.g. locations of cities in places
• Codified knowledge, like the scientific names of plants and animals
• Rules and regulations

Really, you don't need a search engine to do most of these things. But services like Google make doing these things easier than having tables/charts for how to make conversions, reading over print publications, etc.

What search engines dont tell you

Search engines can spit you back a bunch of symbols in response to a search query, but it is up to you as an individual to interpret that information.

Above, I gave some pretty dry, uninteresting search query examples. Let's look at some other things people might search.

Spanish language learning

On the one hand, there is a pretty standardized thing we call Spanish. There are correct and incorrect ways to conjugate verbs, use articles with nouns, and so on and so forth. This sort of information, you can look up. It will likely involve learning some of the conventions of a popular dictionary (e.g. how do they indicate what sorts of conjugations a verb uses), but once you learn how to do this, you can quickly use searching technques to boost your language learning speed.

You may find that doing a Google search for something like "Spansih language learning", rather than getting the information like I described above, you are given links to many products and services. Now, I am not saying that there is anything wrong with these products, services, but what I am saying is that what Google is giving to you is not just "raw information" like in the first set of cases I introduced in this article (weather etc), but rather you are being given suggestions on a particular sort of behavior you can follow.

Learning Spanish involves learning some grammatical rules, a bunch of vocabulary, and getting practice applying this knowledge listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Search engines may sort many doors to places where you can do these things, but the search Engine doesn't necessarily teach you how to learn a foreign language or give you the means by which to sort through these options.

History

Google can probably do a very good job giving you dates of birth and death of various people, when named battles/wars occured, and so and on forth. Basically, it can be a good index for historical knowledge that is establishment accepted and codified.

Google might try to tell particular stories and say who is important and why through how it ranks its results. Should you just buy the official narrative?

You've probably heard sayings like "there's two sides to every story". Likewise, when using Google to find out about history, we should be critical of what sort of views are favored by Google (they aren't "neutral").

Note that people will often talk about "algorithms" and what they do. You cannot seperate algorithms from the people that program them and the data they feed it. There are some pretty funny terms in machine learning and AI research like supervised vs unsupervised learning and discrimination tasks. ¹

Tech Solutions

Engineering takes careful thought and planning. Searching Google will give you "hot" results—new things that someone is hyping up. Whether or not these solutions will actually meet your present needs with the least amount of trouble is a different question.

For instance, consider how nowadays, there is a big push for cloud computing everything and the "Internet of Things". Searching for tech solutions, I am guessing you'll get a lot of these things. You probably don't need these things and they will likely be very expensive and compromise your privacy, security, etc. That's just the nature of letting somebody else manage your data!