Wow, sign me up to carry a spear! Oh, I am not an academic librarian, dagnabbit. This article does such a great job of explaining some of the problems with keyword searching. I refuse to allow that it doesn't affect pulic library reference service.
I have always stumbled a bit trying to explain why the catalog is better than Google or Amazon. (In some iterations, it is not. Chagrin.) I have had to explain the concept of controlled vocabulary to patrons and staff, like it is an idea from Mars, or some as-yet undiscovered planet. Most of our newspaper electronic resources have little to no subject headings. We have a new product that gives you a hit list with "near" spellings. So far, I can't make out how they decided what was "near". I was very excited to see 18 hits for my surname in historic newspapers. It turned out they were for McKinney, M'Henry, MacKenna, etc. No cigars. So this product and its family may seem to promise much to genealogists, but deliver disappointment.
But there's much more meat to the article--read it! Pick up a spear. We are interested in better access to information. That does not have to mean "dumbing down".
Google's relevance ranking of keywords is not the same as conceptual categorization of sources accomplished by LCSH. The difference is finding "something quickly"—isolated, unstructured, and disconnected information—versus gaining a systematic overview of the conceptual field.
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