My continual frustration with search engines and navigation of data to find relevant, specific information has me wondering if heirarchized searches are the way to go. Everyone is familiar with the concept of the democratic forest, even you are unfamiliar with the term itself. The idea of the democratic forest is that, now that millions of people have internet access and there are hundreds of ways to put information on the internet, it creates a dense thicket of information that is totally disorganized and difficult to navigate. We have access to as much information as we want, but we have no way to find the exact information we require. Take, for example, an uncurated online artist registry. The face-value function of a registry is to help interested parties find new and undiscovered artists, but with every artist tagging his/her work under every category (to appear in more searches), it becomes impossible to navigate. An even more popular example would be facebook. Try to find something one of your friends posted 3 months ago, and you'll find that there is no good way to go about it.