If you have been paying careful attention over the past few years, you may have developed the notion (as has most of the world) that with the right kind of software, you can do pretty much anything in this world. Or perhaps the better way to say it is, the right kind of software can do pretty much anything for you if you want it to. With software behind you, you can design things within a few minutes which would have taken hours with a slide rule, and you can check out your designs in three dimensions instantly, as if you were actually right there. The question that this kind of thing beckons is, can software actually do our research tasks for us?
While everybody knows that there is an abundance of search engines out there (and who has not used them plenty of times?), not everybody really thinks about the method that these search engines use, for getting the information of the Internet off of some distant servers and onto our browser windows. The process is actually a little bit more complicated than your favorite search engine makes it appear at first glance, because the entire thing has to happen through a complex series of commands and variables.
Of course, when it comes down to actually researching something, it does take a human’s mind to be able to sift through the mountains of junk data, and the hundreds of redundant pages which are inevitably going to come up in a modern search engine for almost any kind of topic that you might conceivably be looking for. So while you can use a search engine for finding just about anything which is on the Internet (or even the caches of things which no longer are), so far there has been no artificial intelligence developed which can effectively do the actual task of researching for you.