In a large business organisation the number of files is huge. Documents are created and named by people with different backgrounds, varying levels of logical thinking, and with different agendas. Being able to find a document becomes 'corporate knowledge' – In practice most organisations have a huge wealth of work which could be re-used if only people knew that it existed or where to find it.
I've worked for a number of large organisations. They all develop standards for the file structure for a project. This relies on people following that standard, but to be honest they just want to create their documennt and get on with their work. They end up just putting it under a subdirectory with their name in it! Then we have to have whole teams of 'project office' people to make sure that the documents end up in the right place on the right server.
The 'solution' to this? Let's create a search engine that trawls through all the files on a system and creates indices that mean that the files can be found when they go missing. Even our personal computers come with these things now. Suddenly my hard disk starts thrashing. What's up? Oh, Beagle is busy re-making the index. Or Google desktop. These all seem to me to be fixing a problem we should not have created for ourselves in the first place.