On Search: Metadata by Tim Bray Metadata on search, Yahoo! and Google and futility of requiring metadata with more than a few fields except in special cases. Yes, one Dublin Core lesson sort-of. Maybe not even a dozen. Of course that still has yet to be learnt by some in the digital library world.
On the web and semantic web, clearly the intention is to have more machine-readable metadata around and that should make search better. Which funnily, is where I came from in using RDF: a little simple metadata to make it easier to find things. Web links just don't always cut it.