Yesterday a colleague passed on a link to a wonderfully thoughtful journal article: Knowledge Creation Platforms: The Next Step after Web-Scale Discovery, by Carl Grant, whom I am now following on Twitter.
In this piece, Carl brings us up to speed with a brief history of how technology has gotten us (libraries) to our current search boxes and strategies, and then suggests we've lost the war with Google, so we'd better start focusing on something better.
"How can we add such compelling value to the life of our users that they will reaach out to us first in some aspect of their daily work/life flows centering around knowledge?"
He then goes on to describe what he calls the Knowledge Creation Platform, and you should really go read the article yourself to learn what he has in mind.
My only beef is that the article seems to end a few pages early, without pointing out the final solution; what product do I install or buy that does this now?!? ;-)