what is the significance of search engines in studies?

Answer 1

The biggest thing is the newness of the entire concept of research which allows someone to "surf" a wealth of information and scan it rather effectively for what he or she actually wants to know, now matter how vaguely that is put at the start. They are teaching tools, and really teachers, beyond anything the world has known in a previous generation.

That means our very concept of what it is to learn has got to change in order to keep up. There are some people out there on the forefront of using technology in schools, but only the programmers and the users -- the surfers, if you will -- really know what learning is about. It's about having this nearly unlimited information at your fingertips, where knowing how to know what you want to know -- knowing how to focus your attention on something that is your own little niche or how to take advantage of a great deal of superficial information and a lot of awareness of the connectedness of that superficial information

You see, we are learning to organize our very brains, our very language, our very perception of reality around the Information Age. This is not about how to get information; this is about how to sort through an overwhelming pile of information to that which suits your purposes and meet your needs.

It's about personalization in the extreme.