I do think that Google becomes paradoxically less useful as it gets more effective, but not because other websites are displacing it. I'll use a personal anecdote to explain what I mean, though I acknowledge that not everyone shares my situation.<p>In college, I used Google for 90% of my assigned research papers. I would rattle off questions, fetch some quotes and start synthesizing them into my writing. The other 10% of the time, I had professors who required book sources and sometimes ask me to bring the books to class.<p>Retrieving book sources always seemed like a pain in the ass. It required the labor of traveling to the campus library, finding a call #, etc. But a certain perk went along with all that labor: I was much more strategic and deliberate in my research. When you don't have an instant answer machine at your finger tips, you have to plot your course more carefully.<p>Interestingly, in my case, I spent about the same amount of time doing library research as I did using Google, even though Google should have been much faster in theory.<p>I was very impulsive and non-strategic in how I used Google to gather information. This is my shortcoming, of course, but I think Google enables it - more so as it becomes faster and more effective in returning information.