Microsoft's plan to Google hard drives
Published: 25 Nov 2003 16:05 GMT
Microsoft is experimenting with different search technologies that will, among other tasks, conduct Google-like searches on an individual's hard drive or categorise query results in different ways intended to make the data easier to digest.
In many ways, the research seems geared toward finding a user interface for the storage and database functions in Longhorn, a major Windows update expected in 2006.
Implicit Query, an experimental application that was put together a few weeks ago, for example, retrieves links, music files, emails and other materials that relate to applications running in the foreground, according to the company.
"We analyse whatever text you are working on and then pull out words that are important and query on those automatically," said Susan Dumais, a senior researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interactive Group at Microsoft Research. "The idea is to retrieve a bunch of things without you explicitly searching for them."
Microsoft is also looking at integrating these tools directly into operating systems and applications. "I don't want to stop everything I am doing. Bring the search results to me," Dumais said. "People spent a lot of time essentially acting as a file clerk."
Building a search system that links the many incompatible files has long been an elusive goal for Microsoft, and a pet project of chairman Bill Gates.
With Longhorn, Microsoft intends to finally deliver software that can link the documents, email messages and Web pages that exist in separate, largely incompatible software silos. Longhorn will include an underlying technology called WinFS, derived in part from Microsoft SQL Server, that will allow applications to pull data from a unified database.
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