Can someone explain to me the recent fascination with search?

[DnetMHZ]

It seems to me that every major OS story these days has to do with the latest and greatest search mechanism. When did the search function become the killer app?

Call me crazy but 98% of the time I know where my stuff is, and when I don't, a simple search finds what I'm looking for. If I'm looking for a file on my computer I don't want my search tool searching emails, IMs, the web, my sock drawer, etc. It just seems like overkill.

I also think this is just nurturing already bad habits. I can't tell you how many times I've
dealt with the "Just save it wherever you are" type user. We need to try and teach better
organization of files and folders, not "The wizard or the puppy dog will find my sh!t for me!"

I know most of you will say "Nobody forces you to use it" but I just think that all this development time would be more wisely spent on something more important like security for example.

Just my .02

 

[spherrod]

I generally agree - but a lot of people don't organise their work in such a way. Email search is a big ability though.

 

[loup garou]

I think it's more of an offshoot of designing (or planning to design) filesystems with more metadata. It's great to be able to get all sorts of info along with digital media (think how useful ID3 tags are) and being able to search that metadata is key. I hope that made sense.

 

[Malak]

Originally posted by: werk
I think it's more of an offshoot of designing (or planning to design) filesystems with more metadata. It's great to be able to get all sorts of info along with digital media (think how useful ID3 tags are) and being able to search that metadata is key. I hope that made sense.

Actually it doesn't. Personally, I haven't run a search in windows for years. I know where everything is. How often do people ever search for things?

 

[DnetMHZ]

Morning ^

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

Well considering MY Documents contains 14,000 files, I don't always remember where every file is even though I used the shallow and wide file structure.

Also, think about shared or networked computers. Not everyone knows where everyone stores all the files and have a common, comprehensive search program could make file organization more efficient for multiple users who are sharing continually revised files.

On the whole though I think you are right. I use search rarely (even with a groaning 14000 files) and the regular Windows one works well enough (barely cough sucks cough) for me.

 

[n0cmonkey]

I frequently search for things at work. But I rarely search for filenames or types. That's just a subset of my searches. I'm more concerned with content, and not necessarily my files.

I hope that's where search is going.