I’ve played around with desktop search applications for the past year or so, and until recently was undecided about wether or not I liked them or even needed them. The thought of having some background application sit in my system tray and monitor and index all of the files I create and emails I receive, makes a little uncomfortable. Why would I need some application to help me find files and data that either I created or stored myself! I have a highly refined filing system that works flawlessy to ensure all of my data is easily found within seconds of thinking that I need it….. NOT!

Reality check - many of us in technology think that we create efficient and easy to use filing systems for our digital data that makes things fool proof for finding our data. Kind of like the old Dewey Decimal System we all used to find books in the library as kids. The one flaw with this system is that it assumes you know the “title”, the “author”, or if it’s fiction or non-fiction, genre, etc… of what your looking for. Can you imagine going into your elementary school library when you were a kid and trying to find every book with the word “star” in it? Talk about a needle in a haystack! Well that’s how my data storage has become - despite my efforts to keep nicely organized folder hierarchies and standardized file name structures with date/time stamps incorporated into file names, I’m finding myself at a loss everytime I try to find every reference to “NDMP” that I’ve ever stored on my laptop and email. Let’s face it… finding the “right” data is hard, but there is an answer.

So, the question: Desktop search… do I care? OF COURSE I CARE! Just like we’ve all grown accustomed to using Google, or Yahoo, or MSN or any of the endless search engines on the Internet, I find myself wanting that same capability to find the data I create and receive in email. Do I care where the data is or what file name it has? Not so much. I just want to find it and get to it when I need it. There’s the Google desktop search free download and the Microsoft desktop search product that I’ve played with. They both have their pros and cons, but both of them have been able to make my life a lot easier when I need to search through my laptop, email, and shared file storage to find what I need when I need it.

I don’t want anyone to be mislead… there have been “indexing” products for years. Some worked okay, but most put such an inordinate burden on the host computer that it made the system slow and sometimes unusable. Now with higher powered PC’s and more efficient file systems, the idea of easing the pain of finding data may actually become a reality. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

As the general population start to utilize these new indexing desktop search tools for their day-to-day operation I expect to see many more storage management applications taking advantage of the new way to find data. I have personally become reliant on desktop search technology just like I am reliant on Google to find things on the Internet that I didn’t even know I wanted to find!

Should you care about desktop search? ABSOLUTELY!

Stay tuned for my next blog where I’ll talk about Enterprise Data Indexing and how it will effect the way your company works.

Blog ya later!

Joe

This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2006 and is filed under General, Storage Applications, Storage Management, Advisor - Joe Disher. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.