You Could Look It Up by Jack Lynch review – search engines can’t do everything

What about all the information not available on Google? Lynch's survey of reference books covers much ground and makes the case that for distillation of knowledge and serendipity of browsing, printed texts are easily best

For some years now, the most satisfyingly passive-aggressive way of responding to a factual query on social media has been to reply with a link from the website "Let Me Google That For You". On opening the link, your pesterer sees an animation of their exact query being typed into the Google search field, the "I'm feeling lucky" box being clicked and a page showing what is almost certainly the answer to their question. It is a sadistically elaborate vehicle for a simple message: you are wasting both our time by asking a person something, when you could ask a search engine.

But the search engine is hardly infallible. It is commonly assumed these days that all useful information is on the internet, but it isn't. Most academic research is held in databases that are prohibitively expensive for those without university affiliation or access to a good library. And there is an awful lot of stuff locked away in books that haven't yet been digitised. The easy accessibility of what we can see tends to obscure the fact that so much is in shadow or missing altogether. We take the tip of the iceberg for the whole. If "knowledge" is now largely synonymous with "what you can find on Google", its meaning has become dangerously shrivelled.