With all the ruckus about desktop search these days – I’m assuming there’s enough that you’ve seen it and I don’t need to link to it (yes, I’m being lazy) – I’m beginning to consider the horizon beyond GDS, MSN Toolbar Suite, X1, Copernic and the like. With this level of concerted attention on local indexing, I’m prepared to say that while it’s not perfect now, someone will get it right.
So the more interesting question for me now is: what next? How could the local search experience be improved?
One idea that I think merits some follow up is integrating with remote services. As many begin, for example, to offload local assets to network services, i.e. photos to Flickr, it’ll become more important to be able to extend local search back to the web, as it were. What about my Bloglines OPML files? Or my Audioscrobbler history? Or web-based email?
Microsoft has in the past positioned Avalon as the type of technology that blurs the lines between the network and the client, but personally I think this is a more interesting opportunity. Some of their labs folks are apparently considering the same thing.
Anyhow, this is one answer I might give to Srikant’s question.
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