Search and Delay

By Larry O'Brien

January 15, 2005 —

Community Technology Previews or desktop search? Desktop search or schedule slips? Cv or desktop search? What a depressing way to end the year. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as happy as the next guy not to have to deal with that stupid dog anymore (what is with Microsoft and its belief in annoying animated helpmates?), but I just can’t get worked up about the battle of the find and grep commands. “But it’s Google versus Microsoft! ‘Don’t be evil’ versus The Borg from Redmond! It’s the story of the year!” Sheesh.

Search is an interesting field, but not when it’s a question of keywords and indices. Search is interesting when it’s a question of relevance in an 8-billion-page World Wide Web. On the desktop, even on desktops with hundred-gigabyte drives, search is only interesting to the extent it involves digital photos and videos. Which is why the second slip of WinFS is a much bigger deal than the release of Microsoft’s desktop search toolbar.

That the current advances in desktop search is a big deal is a testament to the moribund utility software market. For years anyone interested in quickly finding files on his PC could use Copernic, X1, LookOut or any of several other products. LookOut, in particular, solved a crucial need in that it dealt with Outlook, whose monolithic, always open, always growing file structure would be a finalist for any “Most Troublesome Design Decisions in an Essential Application” award. Microsoft acquired LookOut earlier this year. (Ironically, “Is LookOut used in Microsoft Desktop Search?” gives no relevant results on the first pages of either Google or the beta of MSN Search.)

It’s not the utility vendors that are to blame for their relative lack of visibility. They’ve been innovative all along. Excuse the tangent, but a new program called Consistency is a great example of a useful idea, executed perfectly. It is a To-Do List manager for tasks with fuzzy frequencies (like “Get a haircut” or “Go for a hike”), and I registered my copy minutes after installing the trial. Check it out at www.sciral.com. Now, back to our regularly scheduled column…

Of course, I’m as happy as the next guy to be able to search within PDFs and within image metadata, and I like the “Search folders” within Outlook and would love to have such things for my file system. However, aside from e-mail, the files that mostly accumulate in baffling, messy ways are digital media. And the interesting problem with digital media isn’t searching the metadata; it’s adding the metadata. This can be most clearly seen in cases where the issue has been solved—the most obvious of which is music CDs.

When you pop a CD into your drive, virtually all media players will shortly identify the CD. This is done by comparing the order and length of the files on the CD versus online databases such as Gracenote’s CDDB. It’s an elegant solution and an important enabler of legitimate ripping (if one had to rename every song as it was being ripped into the computer, the temptation to use P2P networks would be much higher). In addition, there are a number of de facto standard formats for the metadata and playlists and so forth, all of which make possible the not-shabby-at-all auto-playlist and related-artists features that help make the digital music experience quite compelling.

Similarly, a single piece of automatically generated metadata—the date the image was taken—has turned out to be the most valuable thing in picture-management software. Also, because this is an easily determined piece of data, it can be combined with other date-based information to create new tools, such as photo albums linked to maps via GPS tracks. (See, for instance, Microsoft Research’s World-Wide Media Exchange at www.wwmx.org).

In both these examples, the metadata combines both personal and Web-available data to create a better organization. “Googlizing the desktop,” especially with proprietary indices, is nowhere near as compelling. This is why there was the mid-December announcement of a second major slip in WinFS. The metadata store, originally one of the “Pillars of Longhorn,” had already slipped out of Longhorn Client, and Windows Server chief Bob Muglia now says that it won’t ship in Longhorn Server either. Muglia’s description of WinFS’ viability couldn’t be less reassuring. Perhaps it will ship in a Longhorn update in several years, but “that would be the earliest.”

Will WinFS ever ship? I wouldn’t bet my company on it. “No more animated dogs” is all well and good, but if it’s the best Microsoft can do, then Redmond is in trouble. z

Larry O’Brien is a technology consultant, analyst and writer. Read his blog at www.knowing.net.

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/28369

Kannuu betas search tools for iPhone Kannuu says that its search UI will be intuitive by using the four most likely characters in a search are presented on a directional controller, eliminating the need for auto-complete and A-Z searches.

Composite Software combines analytics with search Composite's Discover appliance indexes structured data so that business users may search for answers to business problems by using keywords. Results are aggregated and ranked by accuracy, and resemble a traditional business intelligence reporting system on click-through.

Business Briefs: September 15, 2008 Google decides to sell off its Performics division to the Publicis Group, while Hewlett-Packard acquires Colubris. Also, Microsoft and Novell have decided to expand their 2006 interoperability agreement.

Add comment

Name*
Email*
Country

Comment
Preview

News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>

Download Current Issue
ISSUE 3/15/2010 PDF

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Receive the print Edition?

Google Code turns 5
Google Code Turns 5, and adds a Paxos Algorithm to make the system more stable and reliable.
03/17/2010 11:16 AM EST

Test your Visual Studio 2010 know-how
Microsoft is offering free beta certification exams for Visual Studio 2010.
03/17/2010 11:08 AM EST

Microsoft lifts the hood on IE9
Microsoft is previewing IE9.
03/16/2010 01:10 PM EST