Metadata Maven Jane Greenberg reports from Seattle:

greetings and hello from Seattle (here at MS faculty summit)

among the a.m. highlights is “A Farewell to Keywords: The reigning obsession with search technology has elicited new ways of using images to track down information on the Web” by Gary Stix in the July 2006 Scientific American. [not freely available despite being listed as a “Free preview.” the preview is the first two brief paragraphs- pj]

“A picture may be worth a kilo of words, but typing into Google Image the single word “rosebud” returns about 60,000 pictures. [actually 58,500 at Google; MSN Search only gives you 20,224– pj]

The power of an individual keyword is both good and bad. It can find a virtual stack of Web pages. But it is unable to differentiate between the flower in bloom and legendary film director Orson Welles’s scowl. Ideally, an Internet user should be able to use the likeness of a rose to tell a search engine to find others like it….”

see:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=000F16A0-10E3-1493-906183414B7F0162
[stuck behind a paywall – pj]

sorry, i don’t have a blog, or i would have put this message there instead. [No problem, Jane. I blogged it here for you. – pj]