No, no, no. I don’t mean the children. I mean ‘smell’ what’s a few levels down in a heirarchical taxonomy, as Victor Lombardi writes in Where Nav Meets Taxonomy. Children, in this case, are those topics which are subordinate to other topics. Think biological classification: mammals are a parent of canines, and so forth. Lots of energy in site design/navigation goes into trying to apply taxonomies and ontologies to site content, pretending that this will work for most visitors because they will understand that canines are mammals, and know where to look for information about dogs if they see a link titled Mammals on the home page of your site.
There is a reason most good sites (unlike this one) have solid search. Taxonomies are important metadata for search, but are not often a perfect match for how people understand, and navigate, certain content.
I’ll have to read Victor’s site more often, although the RSS feed didn’t seem to work, which makes keeping track more complicated. Update: now the RSS feed is working fine… maybe I found a bad link earlier this afternoon.