"Recollection unearths hidden connections between past and present and gives sustaining meaning to our lives."
(Hutton re: Wordsworth, p. 58)
Though all the web is interconnected, it is not always easy to find connections that have meaning. The current web allows for searching by keyword and makes some attempt to seach by "fuzzy logic" or similar ideas. But the burden of structured searching is still on the searcher who must not only build search criteria that will elicit useful information, but who must be willing to make the logical or intuitive leaps that tie that information together in a meaningful way.
In that respect the current web is not unlike the Star Trek computer. On the Enterprise, a crew member will ask the computer a question, receive an answer, ask another question, receive another answer, and continue until they have received enough data to synthesize a conclusion. The computer waits passively for this to happen. It does not suggest answers based on the questioners requests. It does not offer to solve the puzzle. Meaning lies always in the mind of the questioner.
This limitation of the Star Trek computer may well seem as humorous to us in the near future as the size of computers just a few decades ago seems to us today.
Already underway on the web are efforts to make web searching "smarter." A simple, almost manual form of this can be found at amazon.com in such features as "peer reviews" and "people who bought this book also bought..." in other words, Amazon tries to anticipate the customer's needs by making connections.
Current efforts underway aim to automate this idea by analyzing search patterns and redrawing links and search results based on the paths followed by where people have searched and how many times links have been made. One example that is used to describe this is: Builders can build the building, build a parking lot, and lay the sidewalks and paths where they think people will go. Or they can spread wood chips on all the between areas, wait for people to make their own paths, then lay the sidewalks where those beaten paths have been made.
This idea has prompted both utopian and dystopian reactions:
Dystopian, see: http://www.newscientist.com/features/features_224417.html