Google was essentially a person, a reference librarian. If you wanted to find something on say growing vegetables, you could go to the gardening or farming sections of the library. But in the thousands of books in that huge section you'd quickly get overwhelmed. That's where reference librarians and archivists come in. They take your topic and help you narrow it down even further, applying their own nuanced knowledge and specialized training to help you search better and find exactly what you're looking for. That's how search operated for centuries by topic mediated by human to human interaction and it works pretty well.

The idea behind the reference interview is for the librarian to respond to questions by asking questions in order to supply the best possible resource. Frequently, this is really useful because people will ask for the kind of information they think the librarian can find, rather than what they actually want.