Gary Boone, Accenture Technology Labs, writes:
“Search engines have been the killer app of the Web. What’s next? Beyond search engines are summary engines.

Without search engines the Web would be far less diverse and far less useful. They make every online site and document as close as a few well-chosen keywords.

Well, that’s the theory. In practice, the search engine paradigm is broken in a fundamental way. What do you do with the results of a search engine? You search them! Worse, you search them manually, tediously, with no help beyond the hope that they’re ranked in a useful order.”
http://www.accenture.com/xd/xd.asp?it=enweb&xd=services\technology\people\weblog\boone.xml