The head librarian at my high school was an older lady in her early 60s, and she suggested that I use Google because it was the best search engine. Back then I used Webcrawler, but there wasn't too much distance between the competition.
I thought it was weird that "googol" was spelled incorrectly and that Google's logo was ugly even by Paint Shop Pro 4 standards. It looked like search for kids. I assumed the librarian didn't know anything about computers and dismissed her advice. Within a few months everyone was using Google.
Pro tip: Most librarians have master's degrees and their field is all about information storage/organization/retrieval. It takes very little time to teach a kid how to put books on a shelf. The reason librarians are at libraries is to manage the collection of knowledge and to help people find information. So I'd give a lot of weight to a librarian's opinion on a search engine. The hardest part is finding out whether or not someone working at a library is a "real" librarian without being insulting.
Probably different in different places, but in many libraries I've been to, you often interface with student part time workers or the stereotypical ancient person who still lives in a previous age and is bitter about people being impolite.
But I'm always reading positive stuff about American public libraries that they are not really just about borrowing books, but free internet, photocopying, showers, some kind of free social program to help poor people with any information related stuff, like job search or government forms.
I really was boring when the floor, the desk, the cubicle, the walls, and the computer were all the same shade of aging beige. The sterile asylum days of technology industrial design.
OT, but... That article has the most misleading graph I have ever seen. It plots two items with the same units, but different origins and scale. It looks like we had a huge drop in active leisure time and it was replaced hour-for-hour by screen time (and that screen time was near zero in 2000). Instead a modest decline in the former and a slightly larger increase in the latter
I thought it was weird that "googol" was spelled incorrectly and that Google's logo was ugly even by Paint Shop Pro 4 standards. It looked like search for kids. I assumed the librarian didn't know anything about computers and dismissed her advice. Within a few months everyone was using Google.