Although search engines have greatly enhanced access to information, and storage technology has made it cheap to digitise nearly everything, search tools need to be refined to make it easier to digest information or conduct queries. That was the word from researchers and speakers at the New Paradigms for Using Computers Conference, held at IBM's Almaden research lab here last week.
"We live in a world with lots of information but also lots of interruptions. It is a teriyaki of information. The question is, 'How do we survive in the marinade?'" joked Dan Russell, senior manager of user sciences and experience research at IBM Almaden.
Early attempts to better locate the world's information are already under way. The University of California at Berkeley, for example, showed off at the conference a prototype of a search engine called Flamenco that makes it easier to search for works of art or antiques. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Inxight, meanwhile, has created software that attempts to graphically represent latent connections between people or institutions by studying where and how they get mentioned on the Web.
On the desktop, companies such as Ingenuity Software, founded by former Apple Computer developer Bruce Horn, are creating tools designed to make it easier for people to index their photos and documents for subsequent Google-like searches on their hard drive.
These research efforts are in addition to new operating systems under development that will include better search tools.
Microsoft plans to add better search features to a future version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, due sometime around 2006 or 2007. The software giant last week demonstrated a more general Web search "service" that's also in development.
And Apple's Tiger, a new version of the company's Mac OS X operating system that's due next year, will include a new system-wide search engine called Spotlight that will allow Mac users to quickly search and find any file, Apple says.
How many books?
One of the surprises that has emerged from the Internet Archive, which is intended to become a repository of everything ever published, is that the body of public works can probably be corralled, said Brewster Kahle, founder of the organisation.
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