I'm concerned about the assigned reading about search engines. It says 2003 in the citation, but the site clearly says 1999. Either way, everything about search engines has changed since then. There are some things that even I can pick out as out of date, like the idea that spiders only crawl the first few levels of the hierarchy and miss lower items. Data processing is so exponentially faster these days that this isn't really the case except in the most massive sites, which are a tiny minority. I spoke with someone who works in search engine optimization, and he had drastically different information than the article presents. The criticisms about search engines may have been valid back then, but things have changed drastically. There are new criticisms now! I'm sure the definitions of metadata and so forth haven't changed too dramatically, but I don't know.
Google has completely redefined search engines and how they work. In February of 1999, 2 months before the article was last updated, Google had 8 employees. Now, it seems to either out-competes or own practically everything on the Web.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm arrogant, maybe I'm missing the point of the article, but I am unarguably concerned.
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