Today, the primary way in which we find information on the web is the search engine. However, this is a problem, because it places our ability to navigate the web into the hands of those who own those search engines. Many of these search engine owners are large megacorps. Google, for example. I have to say that I find it most suspicious that Google so often directs searches to YouTube videos in favor of text, and that Google owns YouTube, a site it makes ad revenue on and so has a vested interest in directing people to as much as possible. And how many search engines are getting paid by Amazon and other megacorps to drown out the sites of any and all competitors? Other search engine providers may offer alternatives, or search engines specific to their site, but either lack the resources or inclination to develop this into a truly robust tool.
Some may both have a lackluster search facility and be a megacorp, like Tumblr. I remember an instance of trying to search for one of my meticulously tagged posts on that site in order to copy it elsewhere. I was unable to find it after repeated searches on various tags I knew I would have used. Eventually I had to resort to manually scrolling through my posts until I encountered the post in question. How does Tumblr search work? Who knows? Is there a fix? No, not on Tumblr at least. It's a site, like so many other social media sites, where your all old thoughts go to die, whether you want to keep them or not.
Sometimes we don't want to keep those old thoughts. But sometimes, we very much do want to keep them. What then do we do to ensure we can find those posts, without worrying they will be drowned under a deluge of date-ordered posts? How do we find that one essay we wrote two or three years ago that we want to show to the people who weren't there?
The answer is that we need to organize it ourselves. The answer is that navigation should produce reliable, repeatable results that don't prioritize the desires of other entities to sell us things over helping us to find things. The answer is that sometimes a carefully designed folder or link hierarchy is the way to go. Imagine if, instead of a blog on multiple topics, or even one topic, organized by date, all of the posts you made that you want to show the world were organized by topic or subtopic. Instead of a sideblog for gardening, you could have a webpage devoted to it that had separate sections devoted to your dazzling photos of your garden, your gardening howtos, and a journal where you recorded the goings on of the garden. Howtos could further be divided into subtopics like gardening tools, growing edible plants vs non-edible plants, growing plants from seed, growing plants from bulbs, growing plants from cuttings, composting, and mulching. Additionally, you could have subtopics of those subtopics that you wrote particularly prolifically on. Thus your readers (and you) could navigate to any individual howto fairly quickly regardless of its age. Though it's useful minimize the depth of such hierarchies, a little depth can mean a lot less length, and so can dramatically reduce manual search or browse times. It is also unquestionably better for an at-a-glance overview of topics available than search, or for finding images in various categories (while automated image search exists, it is best for finding exact copies of images, not images that only have a similar theme or topic).
Tags can also be a truly powerful organizational tool, but they can also be (and often are) subordinated entirely to search. But their potential far exceeds this. Tag clouds, like the kinds that Dreamwidth allows for, can convey the most discussed topics on a blog at a glance. Imagine what understanding we could gain about a site if these were added to information-heavy websites? Dreamwidth also keeps a listing of all tags the user can browse through and view all related posts for, as well as allowing users to mark tags as synonyms of each other. Tags could also be organized in hierarchies, such that if a post or page were tagged with a topic further down in the hierarchy, say 'biology' or 'physics', it would automatically be labelled as 'science' as well.
This is one reason why having even a static personal site has value. This is also why using alternatives to search for web navigation are valuable. But we have to be willing to take on the work to organize our life's work. We can't leave it up to Google or Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook to do these things. We have to take the responsibility and time to curate, so we can take back the ability to access the very work we created.