[TAG] MS plans competition for Google

[Jimmy O'Regan]

Jason Creighton wrote:

>On Sat, 31 Jul 2004 20:46:07 -0700, 
>Mike Orr <mso at oz.net> wrote:
>
>  
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>>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3939273.stm
>>
>>"At its annual analyst meeting Microsoft unveiled a prototype of an MSN toolbar
>>that works with the Internet Explorer browser.
>>
>>As well as letting people search the net, it also lets them query the
>>documents, images, e-mails or spreadsheets stored on their PC."
>>    
>>
>
>Images? How's that gonna work? Filenames, and maybe some metadata
>attached to the image it's the only thing I can think of that is easily
>searchable.
>  
>
Yep. There's a lot of stuff that can be put into image metadata. Just 
using EXIF, you can have the date and time, the coordinates and a 
description; the W3C is working on embedded RDF so you can have, say, a 
FOAF description of the people/places depicted. If you want speculation 
about the future, Intel's computer vision library can already do face 
recognition, so it's only a matter of time before you'll be able to draw 
a doodle and have the computer search for images that look like it.

>>Oh goody.  Now you don't have to install Cygwin and grep (or use the
>>Find in Files thing in the Start menu), you can just type into the IE toolbar.
>>How revolutionary.
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>Oh, they wouldn't do something so silly as just implementing just a
>simple GUI grep-like tool and then call it a great feature, would they?
>  
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Of course not. It'd be more like locate :)

This is probably the first step towards WinFS, which is a metadata-based 
virtual file system, like GNOME Storage or BeFS. The MSN stuff will 
probably add a framework for applications to be able to hook into it, so 
the indexer will understand their file formats etc. They might even be 
going for something like Dashboard.