I've spent the last ten years obsessing over search engines on the Web. I've taught endless numbers of classes about them, and have maintained a decade-old site (now on its own domain) that includes fairly extensive coverage of search engines and how to use them. I've published about this topic and have given conference talks. As I said, I've been obsessed.

It seems like self-heresy to suggest that maybe librarians shouldn't maintain Web pages about search engines or teach classes devoted to these tools. But I'm in a heretical mood today, so here goes.

I know there's a good argument to be made that academic librarians (along with their counterparts in other types of libraries) are extremely well equipped to train students to use search engines. Theoretically, I'll go along with this. Based on the research I did for an article in press for Research Strategies about Web search training, and my general observations over the years, I'm just not convinced that librarians are doing that great of a job.

Bottom line: we need to teach about search engines in order to explain what they are and how they differ from the indexes, databases and e-journals that our libraries subscribe to. This is important information to incorporate into our instruction about the research process. But beyond this, we should leave the topic alone. Let students experience search engines on their own.

I don't think we're doing students any favors by going over the obvious engines and demonstrating a few of their features. And by "favors," I mean giving students knowledge that will help them not only now, but also will take them into the future. We don't even give students reasons to use individual search engines based on their needs. (This is the focus of my Research Strategies article.) This is a time of amazing innovation. From what I've seen - and of course there are exceptions - librarians aren't looking at this innovation. For example, take a look at this non-librarian-created list of The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines that recently made the rounds. If we want to give students information they can take away with them, we should be highlighting emerging tools and the phenomenon of emerging tools. We should be showing students how to track this phenomenon. This might actually be useful.

Consider the search engine lists that show up on academic library Web sites. Most of these tend to cover the obvious sites, and have nothing original to say about them - if they say anything at all. The pages are pretty much interchangeable. The lists are often outdated, sometimes badly so. In preparation for this posting, I did a random sample of academic library sites and found this to be the case. I won't go so far as to provide links to these pages - it's bad practice to point fingers - but I was very disappointed with what I found.

I'll bet that most of our students can handle this level of knowledge on their own. In fact, for many of them, their knowledge is probably more current. I have to ask: Has anyone done good usability studies about their search engine pages?

I could be wrong about this, but it seems that fewer libraries these days are maintaining lists of search engines on their sites. In my random exploration, I found a bunch of sites that don't have such lists. I, for one, would like to know the reason why. I'm all ears.

Let's concentrate on what we know best and what targets our scholarly investments: the research tools that our libraries provide.