I mean, I understand what you mean when it comes to Google -- the web essentially becomes locked into a particular proprietary solution to finding information.

I mean, I understand what you mean when it comes to Google -- the web essentially becomes locked into a particular proprietary solution to finding information. I definitely still have hundreds (maybe into the thousands?) of bookmarks of sites that store information I care about. But I don't think this tool deserves the same sort of mixed feelings. I don't think this replaces structure -- there's still value to having a conceptual mapping of where documents are stored, and for grouping sets of documents together. It's just that having a structure doesn't help if you don't know where in the structure something is stored. This sort of tool is a bottom-up approach for the times when the top-down approach doesn't work very well. Do you have similarly mixed feelings if sometimes, even with my carefully-crafted set of bookmarks with all their nested folders, I use the search tool to find the bookmark I'm looking for? It's the same idea. Sometimes a top-down structure is beneficial. But sometimes things get misclassified, or you forget about some piece of the structure, or you aren't familiar with some new structure, and in those cases, having bottom-up tools are immensely useful. There's no risk of vendor lock-in here. It's just a difference of approach in information retrieval.