The coming search wars
John Markoff at NYT reports on google’s early counter to Longhorn searching, a PC file and text search utility.
The project, code-named Puffin, has been running internally for a year, and is overseen by a previous MS product manager. It will start as a free download, though no sign of it as of this writing. As google goes after some of this Longhorn stuff, MS is preparing an advanced web search service to counter google.
Not having looked at Longhorn, I see that it intends to make the standalone browser unnecessary. I’ve grown attached to modern browsers’ level of personalization and continuing stream of innovation in the form of plugins; but maybe Longhorn will blunt the inroads being made in browser space. At the moment, browsers are a very “sticky” product for me.
And natural language queries: I’m anxious to see what “where are my vacation photos” returns–I can imagine how ‘vacation’ and ‘photo’ are handled, but what about ‘where’ and ‘my’? I’m sure NL has come a long way since the ’90s when I was spending so much time on NL frontends to SQL databases.