In order to test the power of metadata on information retrieval, the author designed and conducted an experiment on a group of seven graduate students using the Dublin Core as the cataloging metadata. The experimental results show that, on average, the retrieval error ratio is only 2.9% for the MES system (URL: http://140.136.85.194), which utilizes the Dublin Core to describe the documents on Web, in contrast to 20.7% for the seven famous search engines including HOTBOT, GAIS, LYCOS, EXCITE, INFOSEEK, YAHOO, and OCTOPUS. The very low error ratio indicates that the users can use the information of the Dublin Core to decide whether to retrieve the documents or not.