Search engines are the most common means today with which users attack the resource discovery problem. The usefulness of search engines for resource discovery is limited, however, in particular for the higher education community due to the lack of selectivity. The Scout Report Signpost utilizes the content from the Scout Reports as the basis of a metadata collection. However, as the amount of data indexed by these tools has grown, their usefulness has actually diminished. Precision has diminished as recall has grown.
Searches including common terms can literally return hundreds of thousands of results.
One promising trend is the adoption of metadata , or structured information about data, to provide useful information about documents and collections. Searching metadata instead of searching an index generated from the actual content of a resource can facilitate a higher correlation between a user's query and the location of relevant content. At the same time, people have been creating specialized collections of Web resources. Scholarly sites related to specific fields of study are identified, described and made available as meta-sites , that is, Web sites that contain links to other Web sites. Project Isaac's goal is to link human-mediated, highly authoritative collections of cataloged and classified Internet resources into a seamless single, virtual collection.