>Its clear that library cataloging is entirely to expensive (and time
>consuming) for describing all of the resources on the net... no one (I
>hope) is going to argue this. Its also clear that full-text indexing
>will not work (someone may argue against this...)
Let's not look at this as an either-or proposition. Full-text search
engines these days generally can also do relational operations on fielded
data, such as that you'd extract from META tags.
In other words, full-text PLUS meta-data (from META tags, HTTP headers,
annotations, ratings, etc.) is more powerful than either one alone. I
don't think there's any question about that.
Nick