Where to really look …

… You Could Look It Up by Jack Lynch review – search engines can’t do everything | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… what is new may be our unwarranted confidence that what we find is the last word. As the literary scholar Jack Lynch argues: “The information at our fingertips is more diverse than ever before, but in some ways it is more limited.” It is partly as a warning, then, that he has written a survey of the printed reference book just as it seems to be passing from the world, and so his diverting and anecdote-rich history has an inevitably elegiac feel. (“You Could Look It Up” might be read as exclusively past-tense.)