Funny, I'd put it the other way around. Isn't searching what we do when we don't know exactly where something is?

And – admitting I might not be a stereotypical computer user as my files have a high level of organisation – isn't searching the high-level kludge that fails relatively often, especially with hard to parse binary information?

I couldn't imagine relying more on meta-search than knowledge of where my files are located. A tag tool might be nice though, as it enables you to create an alternative hierarchy more suitable to a specific activity without completely abstracting away the physical layout.

Tags and folders are a way to structure and organize your stuff, not a kludge. Tagging things, or placing them in containers (possibly also containing other containers) are valuable to add metadata and semantics to the entities.

In a way, placing things in folders is some kind of (hierarchical) tagging, in which those 'tags' (folder and file names) form a traversable path to the entity. Adding tags to entities adds another retrieval path to the objects.

Folders/directories are a necessity as long as we continue to distribute collections of files the way we do. I'm not sure what github would look like in a world without directories, nor how file naming would work. Do you have a proposal for the issues that doing away with directories brings up?

Folders are only a human factor necessity. Tags forming a graph of related files are more capable, but harder to manage mentally since they can reach any part of the system and cross boundaries.

Search doesn't help when you don't remember filename.

Sure it does when the search also investigates the contents of the files.

For example, GMail and Outlook do this for mail items -- you don't need to know the subject, which is comparable to the file name, to retrieve an email -- and Google Desktop Search (discontinued) or Copernic does this for file systems. It is almost as if every system-retrievable item inside a file (e.g. every word in a text document) automatically becomes a searchable item of the file.

The Outlook is a prime example for situation when pure search doesn't help. When I'm looking for some mail 1+ year old I sometimes don't even remember one correct word in it. Then I resort to some kind of tag system - folders, timestamps etc. And some times I don't find it at all.

So far this only works with text-based files. For videos or photos, there's usually not much good metadata or machine-readable file content.

In an ideal world it should be enough to remember a couple of key words in the file, and possibly some relevant metadata.

In an even more ideal world I should be able to search for "all pictures of my daughter from last Christmas, unless they are out of focus".