Then came Google. Don't get me wrong, I still love Google and use it daily for certain types of searching, but believe me, you don't want to waste your time typing in "free games"--that'll lead you to endless links, many inactive, other's useless, some profane, a few simply spyware spider holes.
So, now what are we investigative netizens to do? We still want Google to have a list of anything and everything available to us, so it has it's place, but now it's time to get a more trustworthy and specific search when we're looking at a topic. Wikis have proven to use the democratic process and allow for community information building, but with a web search, we need something slightly different. This is were tagging comes into play. Sites like www.shadows.com are basically search engine communities built by surfers themselves. You find a site you like and tag it for the team. For example, my search for "free games" came up with about 100 sites and most of them seemed to be tagged appropriately. While I know this system lends itself to abuse by the self-promotional, it still seems the best middle ground we have between the old Yahoo! lists and the complete Google compendium.
- Hutch
