Judy Luther's Library journal article, "Trumping Google? Metasearching's Promise" provides a well articulated opinion of why metasearch will be important for the future of libraries. The article interviews staff largely from academic libraries who are using metasearch to meet the needs of Google-era novice searchers who have grown to expect a simple, unified searching experience. I find the following paragraph to be true.

bq. In academic libraries nationwide, the same conversation is taking place between librarians who don't want the interface "dumbed down" and librarians with usability practice who know that patrons basically want the Google experience. It's time for librarians to accept that library users are not interested in being more like us. If we don't understand that the majority of our users are novice searchers who may wish to remain that way, we are missing the opportunity to serve the pragmatic user who is happy with a "good enough" answer.

What's true is the idea that we need to provide "good enough" answers via metasearch to users who don't want to invest the time to find appropriate sources and execute searches for more precise results. As Luther notes, metasearch is for average users, it's not for us (librarians and expert users). This is validated in a recent newspaper article, titled "Students check out the Web instead of library", that discusses the state of information literacy with college students who will use the web as the sole research source for undergraduate work. It's a pretty surprising observation of the state of information literacy in college students. The point is that these libraries need to understand undergraduate students completely -- their preferences, searching behavior, goals -- and need to adjust their systems to match the students' expectations in the physical and electronic experiences. The same should hold true for any provider of information services and resources that expects to remain useful and relevant to their clientelle.

The point in all of this is that "good enough" results in metasearch is likely to be a requirement in any information system that serves a broad range of user needs. We're in an era where we're finding users, such as these undergraduate students, who do nearly all of their information consumption on the Internet. They are telling us that their most satisfying information seeking experiences are transacted on sites such as ebay, Amazon and Google. Libraries have to recognize the importance of doing user research in order to adjust their systems to meet the needs today's web-influenced users.