Online Research: Narrowing the Possibilities?
This can be filed away in the “I know it’s important, but I’m not sure I can verbalize why quite yet” category. A . It seems that as with many things web, the rich got richer. I haven’t read the actual paper yet, but this quote from it really made me scratch my chin: “Ironically, my research suggests that one of the chief values of print library research is its poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within journals—likely had the unintended consequence of actually helping the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers into a wider array of articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and scholarship.”
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As search approaches perfection and you always get just what you want, you limit your possible inputs. Information is most useful when combined with other information in unexpected ways, but becomes less valuable when the very singularity of 1 perfect answer to your query precludes the possibility of synthesizing the results in new and dynamic ways.