Is search passé? is an intriguing question asked at the Montangue Institute Review for August, 2010. Unfortunately, not being a member, I can’t summarize their answer for you.
It really isn’t that hard to guess some of them. I blogged about Blair and Maron saying twenty-five years ago:
Stated succinctly, it is impossibly difficult for users to predict the exact words, word combinations, and phrases that are used by all (or most) relevant documents and only (or primarily) by those documents, as can be seen in the following examples.
Documents and texts haven’t changed in the last twenty-five years. If anything, the problem has gotten worse due to the volume and variety of material that is now available for searching.
This is a semantic and therefore human judgment problem. Algorithms and “clever” data structures can assist human users in making those judgments, but can’t replace them in the loop.
Imagine a search engine that seeks the assistance of users on semantic issues. As opposed to the skulking around of current search engines and sites. Why not just ask? Politely.
A user-fed search engine with a topic map backend. That could be very interesting.