Once, the encyclopedia told us everything we needed to know. Now there is a multitude of websites to sift through.

Do you remember the good old days when the Encyclopedia Britannica was pretty much the only trusted source for information? Sure, there were newspaper and magazine articles about new and exciting things, but for any reference or historical fact you needed to check, you went directly to the encyclopedia. I remember spending hours with the A volume when I did a project on ants, or learning all I could about pioneers for a Grade 4 project. It is amazing to me that the encyclopedia is now obsolete, and has been for 15 years now.

What has replaced all of that valuable information? The internet, pure and simple. But with so much of the information that we want going digital, it’s getting more and more difficult to sort through it all.

Is there such a thing as too many sources of information? I think there might be. You now have to go to numerous sources to find what you need. You start with Wikipedia to get some basic facts, then a couple of industry websites to pick out some relevant statistics, and conclude by reviewing a few blogs on the topic to get the current point of view. Phew! Only after all of that work is your project, article, or assessment complete. Is the quality any better than it would have been 15 years ago if you had just used the Encyclopedia Britannica and your own thoughts?

But it doesn’t stop there. Imagine that additional, competitive sources of information pop up, newspapers go digital, companies like Twitter disseminate updates in real time. Now there are even more options for you to review. Is that easier for you? You now have to start determining what information is accurate and what is not. That is not going to be an easy feat for someone with little knowledge of the topic, so you review three or four websites to check the consistency of the facts. This has actually created more work for you. You have now become a fact checker.

With so many sources of information, there is only one logical next step for consumers: look for a site that can sift through all of the “noise” and pick out the bits that best fit what you need. Let’s call this kind of company an information aggregator.

These companies of course exist already, Google, Bing, Twitter (to some extent) and many others. It’s an interesting progression of events. We started with one source of information, the encyclopedia, and have now come full circle back to wanting only one source of information, Google (or, to a lesser extent, some of Google’s competitors).

Fortunately for companies like Google, the more sources out there, the more valuable their service becomes. We all want to take the shortest route possible to getting the information we need. If I were Google or Twitter, I would be figuring out the fastest way to be the new encyclopedia.