Desktop Search…. So What?

Gregg has had enough with the desktop search already. Users have enough problems with computers as it is. I think it’s an interesting idea, but is it really needed? So much of what we do these days have moved online, and many apps that are in common use already have ways of managing and finding their data. I’ve seen some people say that the onset of the desktop search (MSN’s in particular) would hearald the end of the directory folder (probably one of the fan-boys hanging around with Scoble). That’s not the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, but it’s close.

It’s an interesting theory, because if you think about it, google has made domain names almost irrelevant. The net was full of product.com sites years ago, but these days if I want to find out about product I’m going to plug it into google and get (generally) better results than going to it’s .com site.

But people aren’t going to stop organizing their data, programmers aren’t going to just put all their source code in one place because they can use a search tool to find code. Nor are they (I hope) going to stop organizing their images or mp3s. Maybe some of this will be less needed when something like WinFS or ReiserFS lets us go into a directory of mp3s and get a decent virtual directory listing/sorting. Maybe. When you have 45,000 mp3s putting them all in one directory just doesn’t sound like a good idea 🙂