When Google was just a plain old search engine with a single box to type terms into, it was liked (?) for its simplicity and convenience. What now? As a retrieval engine it still works well on *some* types of searches. For other searches, despite producing millions of hits, often none are adequate, let alone satisfactory. Presumably this will only get worse as the amount of (unregulated?) content increases to grow. Ah, if only us metadatists had been listened to so long ago. If only the government had understood open standards and information management standards.

There are attempts at alternatives. One possible way forward may be peer reviewed directories. Perhaps there needs to be an awareness that any attempt to build retrieval automatically will not work because there will always be groups of criminals, advertisers, new media people and all the rest working to use it all for their own ends.

This sort of approach may work http://oedb.org/library/college-basics/research-beyond-google