I often wondered why people search! People’s indefatigable appetite for knowledge is the reason for the need to search: search for information; search for people; search for documents; search for books, search for better deals; search for joy; search for love and even the search for God. When searching for information, the average user uses any/all information at their disposal: reference books, search engines and even other people. The act of searching is an iterative process: you issue a query/ make a request and if you do not get the desired result/response you issue a more refined request/query. The average user will continue this process till he/she finds the answer he/she is looking for.

In the search for knowledge, one of the primal sources people have used is books or documents. At a traditional library we use a reference book to search for other books. For a scholar who is a complete novice to a vast subject [i.e. mathematics], the process of knowledge consumption is exhaustive and sometimes repetitive. How would a scholar go about learning only those bits of information he/she is interested in whilst not getting distracted with superfluous information/knowledge? It seems that in addition to having information, also having the right assembly of information is crucial before beginning the knowledge quest [document search].

The water that seemed to quench the thirst called search manifested itself in search engines in 1994. Commercial search engines came on the scene around that time, and since then a plethora of information has been made available to the average internet user. Depending on how you look at it, it is both a good and a bad thing. On one hand, you now have a lot of information to search! And on the other hand, you have a lot of information to search! The need for specialized search engines/ or specialized collection of resources is even now more necessary in our ever changing web 2.0 world. Perhaps search engines like Google/Yahoo will evolve to a point where their purpose will primarily be the identification of specialized content aggregates.

In the search for books, documents, various online portals exist; however a new kid on the block is positioning itself to be the new way to look at documents on the web. Library 2.0 is bookfarms.com. At bookfarms.com internet users can read books directly on the site, search for books based on both actual book content, and user provided information. In addition to books, users can capture. Share and search for actual websites on bookfarms.com. Bookfarms.com is a different kind of library, it is the new library. It is library2.0.