I’ve long been fascinated by collective nouns. Some of these are commonly used, such as a gaggle of geese or a school of fish, but others are more fanciful. An ostentatiousness of peacocks, anyone? How about a shelf of librarians or a relevance of online searchers? And, of course, there is the classic, an exaltation of larks. I’ll suggest we now face a perplexity of platforms.

Now that everyone searches online, the distinctions that professional searchers make between subscription databases and the web is lost on the general public. To them, every platform is equal. Google and EBSCOhost are equivalent; The Wall Street Journal looks just like the National Enquirer; the library catalog isn’t separate from its subscription databases; and an individual publication’s website is indistinguishable from Scopus or Web of Science.

Does this matter? Yes, because it could create a crisis in the library. Suppose a patron finds an article to be inappropriate when searching a subscription database, something the patron views as celebrating a lifestyle or political stance she finds abhorrent. The patron blames the library, believing it is responsible for that article appearing in search results.

Platform changes can perplex librarians, if not their users. When publishers change platforms, discovery services may encounter problems in the migration process, causing headaches for both the publisher and librarians. Customers come up with workarounds, but that’s not the ideal situation.

There’s also confusion between platform and publishing. If you read something you found via Google or Facebook, does that mean Google and Facebook are publishers? Or did these services simply provide a platform for publishing? The legal implications of platform/publisher are staggering. U.K. media regulator Ofcom has suggested reclassifying large web search and social media companies as publishers rather than platforms to combat fake news and extremist propaganda. At the moment, it’s merely a suggestion and unlikely to happen, but the debate is interesting and contributes to the perplexity of platforms.

When online searching was done by intermediaries (aka librarians), we knew that search strategies mattered. Entering chip into a search box could return results on computer chips, potato chips, a chip off the old block, and someone named Chip. We both adjusted our strategy on the fly and filtered results to weed out the extraneous information. What we transmitted to clients was tailored to their requirements. We took the time to ensure quality results, taking platform differences into account.

Information professionals know not to give legal or medical advice unless they have degrees in law or medicine. Today, a tremendous number of people go directly to the web for answers to their legal and medical problems. The advice they receive is not always stellar. Carrot juice as a cure for cancer. Refusing to pay taxes as a political statement. Strident accusations from one end or another of the political spectrum.

While we contemplate the perplexity of platforms, we must consider public platforms that are open to everyone along with the proprietary platforms of our discovery systems and individual databases. Perhaps it’s not so much a perplexity of platforms as a complexity of online research.