To search or not to search …
When you think of a document on your hard-drive … do you think of the drive where it is stored and the folder where it is located? If you do, you are actually ‘old school’ these days.
Today you stop being organized and start searching. X1, Google Desktop Search and Microsoft Desktop Search are stetting the direction of a life on the search.
With an average of more than 100 mails a day, I finally gave up trying to get my inbox organized. What good is it if I organize my inbox according to the departments I am dealing with, when I need to run a cross-departmental project? What good is it to organize my inbox according to products, if my company runs a campaign across multiple products? I have tried so many ways to get my files and my e-mail organized, but I have given up on it … now I just search.
Using search is a process of giving up your old-school habits. “Ingo, do you have this xyz presentation somewhere?” … sure, let me check on my network drive … office documents … presentations – wrong! Stop it! Go to Desktop Search, enter “xyz” and search for presentations – right? This is when this little devil on your shoulder raises his voice: “Are you sure the search result covers all the information you have?”
Search is so much more than just a functionality. I think that it is a shift in paradigm that might have a major impact on file systems and operating systems. Why do you need folders in a file system when you believe in search? What you actually need is a lot of metadata about your files! What is the document dealing with? Who wrote the document? When was it written? Is it my working copy? So the metadata – the information about the information – is taking over the role of a file system making it much more flexible and multi-dimensional. The more metadata I have collected about my files, the better I can define my search, and the more likely it is that I will finally find the file.
If you take a look at Microsoft Vista, you will not only notice that search is everywhere (you even search for programs to run), but you will also notice that metadata is everywhere. If you open up a file browser you will see the metadata for each file directly in the browser. You can click on any field of the metadata and update it without having to open the file. Just like in the media player, you can now also provide a rating for your files to ensure that search returns your favorite files first.
Maybe here is something that Google is missing … dealing with metadata. When I search the web, Google is my first choice - but if I search my desktop, I rather use Microsoft Desktop Search. In my daily work the knowledge of metadata makes the difference between having to fall back to navigating tree structures of the file system, and blindly trusting in the search results of a search engine.
