jt – interesting point: “if we agree that people search on what they tag..” – my assumption would be this is the case. It obviously also depends on the familiarity with which the user comes to the web. For instance, I know (as uber-geek) how to search Google most effectively – not necessarily the harder stuff like url removal – but most effective use of keywords to get the results I am looking for. My mum probably wouldn’t, or wouldn’t persist in the way that I would. This in itself is an interesting usability problem.

Once you get out of Google and into the weirder backwaters of museum / site-specific search engines, the paradigm shifts again. Which is why I almost always use Google toolbar to “search within site” rather than rely on a (probably rubbish) internal search engine: not only do I know it’ll work but the usage is familiar, too.

I’m tangenting 🙂

It’ll be very interesting to see how this develops. It touches on so many things from usability to access to authority. I think it’s readily apparent (and hopefully widely recognised) that it’s badly broken, so any work done is going to help…