The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Just when you thought it was all over, just when you thought Google had the search engine world tied up, the cold war is over, and the real battle is once again beginning. For the last several years, I have used little else except for Google. I remember the frustration of learning to use the Internet seven or eight years ago. You knew the information was out there, you just had absolutely no idea how deep into the haystack you would have to dig to find it. Combine slow dial-up service with inefficient search engines and I found myself often spending entire evenings just searching for information, hoping to track down a few good sites which I would then look at the next night. Amazing how things change. When Google first hit the net several years ago, it was revolutionary. Information was almost instantaneously available, and you could be almost guaranteed that what you were looking for you would find in the first page or two. It was so good that the word entered our language and became synonymous with searching for something; as in "I Googled the company to see what they were doing." Microsoft is working hard to try to change our attachment. Several weeks ago MSN search hit the web in beta form and has been wracking up the hits. Using Google as its basis, the engine is on a sparse page and promises an image and news search as well as a regular web engine. Something new is a preferences page. MSN search allows you to set your own preferences, allowing only pages in certain languages, or from certain places to be returned to you. New and interesting. I never played with it that much so I don't know how well it works. Boasting a five billion page index, it has great potential. Seeing this search engine developing, Google has upped the ante by several degrees. After dropping the bomb of Gmail earlier this fall, Google has now almost doubled its search index, moving from five billion to eight billion pages. This week they also launched a first with Google Scholar, a search tool dedicated to scholarly articles, books, presentations, and journals. Not a massive market, but another niche filled in what is becoming a tighter race. The next tool in this fight has been released by Google in beta form and Microsoft's is coming; desktop search. With more and more people having broadband Internet connections, the line between local and global is becoming more blurred all of the time. Combine this fact with the massive harddrives that most machines have, and the need for a tool to search locally as well as on the Net is past its time. Google's desktop search is a small downloadable program which puts a search tool on the desktop of your machine. This software will search for the information you request, combining things found locally on your harddrive with those found on the web into one set of results. I have a great little program like this for my Mac called Quicksilver. Quicksilver is properly called a launch bar, and searches my harddrive; including applications, email, address book contacts, documents, photos, music, and movies. By simply typing in the first few letters of what I am looking for into this software, I can find anything on my harddrive, or launch any application. Very handy, and it has quickly become indispensable. If you want something, you can find it. ([email protected])11/23/2004
