Scientific American.com: Seeking Better Web Searches
[ INFORMATION SCIENCE ] -- Deluged with superfluous responses to online queries, users will soon benefit from improved search engines that deliver customized results

So, Information Retreival is fifty years old? So how come I was reading books by Melvil Dewey written in the late 1800s about the need to improve the retrieval of information? This is why classification schemes exist in libraries, I thought? Silly me, *ironic mode on* I must have mistaken why a library needs to sort it's books into catagories! *ironic mode off*
But that is not to disparage what is actually a useful article on where search engines are going. But I do have a problem in the apparent assumption that the only information worth accessing is to be found online.
Could it be I just love the sensual nature of books too much and I am not always confident of the provenance of the information I can acquire online?

This is something I am going to have to think about some more. A lot more, I suspect.