And it is here finally. Yahoo was the last one to take the plunge. Just write “Desktop search” in Google and have a look. You will be surprised. Google, Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves all have entered this business. Information is now available at your fingertips. It couldn't have been easier than this.
With the broadband revolution starting in the country you can't expect information to be cheaper. I remember Gana downloading a program from the net because he was too lazy to search for the program in his collection of CD's!
Now that you have enough information at your disposal what is the next step you would take? What will you do with all that information?
I remember that when we were in 3rd sem an old professor who was the lead role in Ontoweb came to our college and introduced us to XML and ontologies. (I was probably the only person who could understand atleast 20% of what he said :)) The founders of Google are his drop-outs. He made an interesting remark – “Google sucks, because it can't distinguish between words that have the same meaning. All it does is, give listings. We have designed a system, which can give us precise answer to questions rather than give a listing of web-sites.”
It shows that this is just the beginning. The desktop search, the Google Sets, and many other related features are all attempts to help us manage the vast amount of information. The desktop search apparently says, “Don't worry about where your information is. Don't spend time organizing it. Let it be where it is. After-all, all that you require is to give you the information that you need when you need it. And that we do well!”
So ultimately this will probably lead to intelligent personal agents that can surf the web and get you precise (digested?) information (crisp and up-to-date) when you need it.
(People who have already criticized me about talking about Information Overload, please don't bother to do it again. I will be having a series of entries in future on this topic.)
