In my last post, I acknowledged that life is richer, with more choices, but making those choices is harder and more complex. I posited web search as the technological response of this generation to that complexity. But, I noted, it has limits.

The limit lies in the sacrifices in decision quality forced upon us by keyword search. Searching on a topical context alone means we still have all the hard work to do: figuring out what's relevant, removing the noise and baloney, etc. Search, as currently offered, merely reduces the web from an infinite mass of incoherent content to a semi-infinite mass of semi-coherent content. We therefore make semi-informed decisions based on more stuff. Not good enough.

Google's response is reasonable: try to figure out what people are probably looking for, and present that first. By the way, if you're willing to pay, you can make sure that what people are "probably" looking for is...you. Semi-coherent becomes, well, semi-credible. We then make semi-informed decisions that advertisers want us to make. Way not good enough.

Really, what we want is for search to provide us not just with content, but with some up-front understanding of the content. We want to make decisions with the full meaning of the content: the attitudes, the quality, the emotions, all of it. Just as we do with any important decision, we want to make it by becoming informed, not overwhelmed.

To get there, we have to start building a web that can be searched on a lot more than just topics.