Some of the new-sounding things that make up "Web 2.0" have been around a while with different names. Tagging gets talked about like it is a new and near-perfect way to link related content. However, it seems a lot like the keyword based searching that was standard 10-15 years ago. Remember when every html document had to have a keywords tag in the header so that search engines could find it? Remember when spammers realised that the keywords didn't actually have to have anything to do with the content?

 

It's not just intentional bad metadata that causes problems. Most people are either lazy, so keywords are left out or are copied from some random document, can't spell, or just have no idea how they should be categorizing the content. Search algorithms have improved a lot in the last decade. People haven't.

 

There's a lot of stuff that computers can't do yet, and having a human reading and understanding content so that the meaning can be searched makes sense on a certain level. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on a large scale because people in general disagree with each other. You probably disagree with most of the people who classified your search results, making the returned results completely wrong. The worst you can get from a computer is logical results that may not be what you want, but you can understand why they would show up. It may not be perfect, but you can trust the computer.

 

Also, the possibility for improvement is important. Any human-generated classification effort creates data. Data just sits there and remains as good or bad as the day it was created. Any problems that get into the system stay there and are essentially unfixable. With a properly automated search, where all understanding of the content is clearly defined, the algorithm can be improved and the problem is gone.

 

Obviously, the problem of always finding what you want isn't fully solved yet. That's not going to happen until you can upload a copy of your brain into the system and have it read the entire internet to find stuff that you peronally would find interesting. Fortunately most of the ideas I have for finding useful information are a little nearer term than that.