Google, Yahoo and others are offering tools to allow users to search
the contents of their desktop. Apple will offer this with OSX Tiger
and Microsoft when Longhorn ever comes out. Seems something users
really want and need.
It would be nice to offer similar facilities to users whose desktop
contents reside on a NetApp Filer. While I expect the existing tools
could be crawl users files from their desktop even if they're on NFS
or CIFS shares, I expect they would be *very* inefficient.
There are already products for the Filer which can scan user files for
virii. I'm guessing these don't run continuously, but rather when a
file is added or it changes on the NetApp. It seems a search engine
could do likewise, indexing or re-indexing the file when it was put on
the Filer or changed, respectively. Then they could find their stuff
quickly and easily.
A sophisticated search product could add value by clustering results
into semantically related groups (e.g., a search on "space" might
provide results grouped by concepts like "room", "geometry",
"astronomy", "freedom"). Other advanced user interfaces could be
imagined, including "fly-throughs" of related concepts and documents.
Do such products exist? I didn't find anything that looked relevant
with a quick google.
Many thanks.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jan 13 2005 - 14:38:40 EST