pmurray has an article on google, amazon and out-googling google. It’s worth a read if just to start a discussion.

Can we do it? As the lead (and perhaps only) cheerleader for the Out-Google Google thesis, I’m starting to have my doubts. First came what looked like automated faceted analysis in Google. That turned out to be Google Co-op Health — a human-driven effort to add metadata to selected websites that appear in the search engine results. (By the way…why didn’t we [the library profession] think of that? And now that it has been thought of why aren’t we doing more with enlisting the aid of experts from their own field in categorizing their segment of the world of information?)