Among our rights in this information age is the right of an individual to seek information.

At a simplistic level this right is far from universally recognised.

For example, many totalitarian governments limit their citizens' access to the fundamental tools which would enable them to seek information.

Moreover, in such situations it is plausible that the citizens are not even aware that the information they could seek could possibly exist.

And why look for something if one believes it not to exist, unless by some implausible spontaneous urge to seek the unimaginable?

Physical barriers to information seeking may appear dramatic, but their overt tangible qualities allude to an unrealised opportunity to seek.

Cognition of this may cause the perceiver to identify a need to seek, and therefore to overcome the epistemological barrier.

What of those barriers which are imperceptible? What if a person undergoes sensory deprivation and lacks any awareness of a reason to seek information?

This could perhaps be said of the person who is content with what information he or she already perceives. What reason is there to seek more if the answer is already known?

Perhaps the greatest threat to our ability to perceive novel questions is to apply a technological solution.

These days, we simply type a keyword and the search engine does the rest. For the cognoscenti, the use of a structured search string optimises the result by causing the search engine to filter out supposedly irrelevant data.

But this is tantamount to dumbing down. Our tireless pursuit of 'better' search engines overlooks the fact that we are abrogating our obligation to think, in the misplaced belief that what a search engine actually does is search.

In fact, a search engine merely reacts to a command to obtain documents containing a particular combination of metatags and words.

We, not search engines, have the ability to search, i.e. to contextualise entities, to perceive and react to an innate taxonomy of our natural language, to rank according to a variety of intangible criteria.

Undeniably, great progress is being made in computer-based natural language applications and search engine technology, but machines have a long way to go to replace our ability to synthesise all nuances in perception, let alone to understand information which is not obviously there.

Search engines are dangerous because they limit our ability to discover.

Whereas it is true that we may receive information serendipitously merely by randomly logging on to any URL, searching is a process of discovery and re-evaluation.

No search engine can cause the same degree of discovery as the human brain.

Yet we are happy to abrogate our responsibility to use our brains optimally. Search engines add huge value in facilitating the rapid and effective retrieval of known information, but to put our faith in this technology disempowers us.

Jonathan Gordon-Till is information manager at Aon Consulting. He writes here in a personal capacity.