Aggregators

I just am not a huge fan of aggregators. Instead of taking an article, forming one’s own ideas, and writing about them, it’s much easier to link up to something. I feel like in a way this is cheapening journalism. I think links are fine to use as long as they supplement an article for reference or further reading. I do not like the fact that aggregators simply compile lists of links. I feel as though aggregators are shallow and not very reliable. They definitely promote “a kind of snapshot-thinking”. They aren’t useful ways of learning about a topic.
Drill down tools, on the other hand, are almost the exact opposites of aggregators. Their goal is to delve deeper into the subject you’re researching, and to give you useful information. Aggregators are helpful if you’re looking for basic, recent information, but if you’re looking for anything beyond that they really aren’t too helpful. Drill down tools, however, are able to find the more obscure articles that you may be looking for.
I looked through some of the drill down tools, and my favorite was the Librarian’s Internet Index. It caught my eye because it seemed reliable, and I soon found out that it was a “search engine listing sites deemed trustworthy by actual human librarians not just a Googlebot”. Humans, unlike computers, are able to pick out which articles are useful, and a site that employs the help of credible people is more likely to yield better search results than one dictated by a robot.