What's the right metaphor here?

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Is searching the internet really a parallel to wandering through a library? It would seem to make more sense to see wandering through a library as analagous to surfing the web, and using the library's card catalog as more analagous to searching. But the lack of a physical entity that might permit physical wandering stops any metaphor before it can be fully realized. It's not just that there aren't any shelves, but that a search engine really isn't a catalog. Each separate search we conduct creates a new and different set of results, and if we choose to compare a page of results on a Google search to a shelf in a library, then we're constantly creating new shelves and/or constantly changing their contents.

So although they may be quite different, I prefer to relate to conducting a search via a search engine as the internet counterpart of wandering through shelves in a library. Functionally they may not have that much in common, but they succeed in creating a very similar feeling of being surrounded by information.

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Go to: I search, therefore I am?