This is probably an obvious metaphor but I only came to it last night, so you’ll have to forgive me. It occurs to me that Google is really nothing more than a searchable card catalog/subject index of all the materials online. Which can be useful as shit if you know approximately what you are looking for. But the major failing of search engines in general is that they are just that; they are not humans. You can’t ask them questions that you could ask humans: questions which are much more open-ended. You can’t even necessarily ask Google to recommend to you the top five books, movies or albums related to a particular thing. Which is totally lame. You *should* be able to easily derive that information from a search engine as complex as Google. In cases like that, what Google ends up becoming is actually more of an index of librarians: of potential sources of information which you could then interact with as actual humans. In other words, bloggers. People who are good bloggers are really just people who are good at storing and combing useful sets of information in a totally human way. Obviously there are efforts to work through these sorts of issues online; Open Directory springs to mind. But they are mostly just baby steps. What I want to see is for Google (or a small competing company with a smart alternative business model) to find a way to immediately connect me with the people who are the leading “online librarians” (experts) to ask about certain types of information. I almost want to be able to download directly the information-selection filters used by certain people to help me parse information to find specific sets and elements of data. Know what I mean? It occurs to me that this is really the service I offer on the web to other people. That ought to somehow be made more explicit.