I was fully looking for something cheerful to post about today, and it turns out that “cheerful” in this instance means finding a use for something about which I have historically felt little enthusiasm: the new-ish top “result” in Google search.

When I worked at Google, one of the realizations I had revolved around questions that we librarians had a tendency to (among ourselves) view as “stupid.” First among those was asking for a book by the color of its cover. Essentially, we felt it was an unreasonable question, because it was one we could not answer. (Also because people remember green books as red and yellow books as blue, but I don’t yet have a solution for that problem.) Sometimes, technology allows us to solve a problem, as I discovered when I went to try to understand of what use color filtering in image searching could really be:



Well, this morning I was grappling with a question and I decided to try using Google AI to answer it, and look what happened:

Are these responses complete? Completely correct? Did I burst into flame from typing a long-form question into a search box? The answer to each of these questions may well be “no.”

Nonetheless, I think about all the times that I wished I knew which databases to search to find x source, and I was pleasantly surprised to have this tool to try and help me.

So – hope this brings some joy or at least ease to your week. Take care, and search on!