There’s some truth to that but Google also has a massive knowledge graph. For imdb and freebase like queries they can give very accurate answers as cards. Other humans don’t need to teach every single fact. They just need to teach how to extract and organize facts from a site.
When you see google giving you a one/two word answer as a card, that’s very likely coming from it’s knowledge graph.
What we need is more of this open knowledge graphs. Google and Wolfram Alpha are both closed sources but have deep understanding in niche domains.
I am not a Google search user so I am not sure what they are doing with "cards", however it sounds as though they are trying more to themselves become a "secondary source" (versus, e.g., just providing some "context" around the matched terms). The goal being that the user never has to leave the Google website.
For example, say the film credits for Spiderman is a "primary source", and a cast list for Spiderman derived from the credits at IMDb is a "secondary source". Google extracts the information from IMDb and substitutes itself as the secondary source.
Does this raise an issue in that ideally users should sometimes be retrieving information from (i.e., accessing) primary and secondary sources directly, whereas a third party always acting as a universal secondary source, e.g., a third party funded by advertising, might introduce (more) bias into the information retrieval process, e.g., in competition for "eyeballs".
You might find this philosophically objectionable but the truth is that most people go to Google to find answers, not "primary or secondary sources", and are therefore better served by the answer fished out and presented to them.
It's also another matter that so much of the internet is now filled with copy-pasted crap and artificially inflated content that it's actually hard to find what you are looking for on the so-called primary source webpages. If I want to find George Clooney's age, I don't want to sift through a 2000 page ad-ridden Page3-esque gossip blog about him.
At the same time, when I want detailed info about something, I will go in and try to read through the primary material.
For such a simple question, why wouldn't you just use Wikipedia?
In any event, neither a blog nor Wikipedia would likely be a "primary source". Maybe something like a driver license would be a primary source.
It could be that you have a "philosphical objection" to "copy-pasted crap and artifically inflated content". I wonder if Google could have a role in encouraging the continued existence of this stuff. The effective opacity it creates seemingly justifies having an entity like Google.
I can’t just enter my question in to Wikipedia and get an answer back, as I can with google as the default search bar. Why would I use Wikipedia when it is more work than googling?
Assuming you entered the name of an actor that has a corresponding Wikipedia entry you would be redirected to the actor's Wikipedia page that, in most cases, shows the actor's date of birth and calculates the age for you.
Even when I entered the actor's name plus the term "age" and was redirected to the Wikipedia search results, I could still see the actor's page as the third result and his date of birth in the summary text.
As for why anyone would want to search some things using Wikipedia versus Google, I can think of a few reasons. I cannot speak for other users however.
I have a script I wrote to search Wikipedia from the command line. For those who care, one can strip out "X-Client-IP" from the returned page html before opening the page in a browser.
When you see google giving you a one/two word answer as a card, that’s very likely coming from it’s knowledge graph.
What we need is more of this open knowledge graphs. Google and Wolfram Alpha are both closed sources but have deep understanding in niche domains.