Well, to return to a post made a couple of days ago, I’ve been trying to use Google for more complex searches than usual (e.g. ‘how to maintain consistency between data sets’ ‘data quality assurance’). And it simply isn’t delivering. No matter what combination of words and phrases I’m using.

I’m also quite pessimistic about how metadata is going to improve this. From a small survey I carried out earlier this year, the local authority use of metadata (on their websites) was very generally of poor quality, erratic, or didn’t exist. In some cases it was simply incorrect.

Metadata would be a step in the right direction - but supported by other retreival methods such as… well, I’ll come back to that.