Read an article yesterday, Microsoft has decided internet search is the next "big" thing, right now MSN licenses technology from a company called Inkotomi. They are developing their own system that will supposedly blow google and everyone else out of the water. Look for it to be built in to windows with the next release codenamed "longhorn" about 2005.
That search engine will likely be tied into one that is built in for searching your computer. Microsoft has realized that hard drives are getting huge and nobody can find anything.
A: Microsoft is trying to make it easier for you to find your data on our ever-increasing hard drives. By adding relational database capabilities to the file system, it will take less time to find documents, email, and other data. After all, as one Microsoft executive asked me recently, "Why can we find anything we want on the Internet in seconds, but it takes so long to find our own data on our own PCs?" In addition to the underlying WinFS technology, Microsoft is also adding a new file system concept called Libraries, which will organize like collections of data in Longhorn, regardless of where they are physically stored in the system. For example, a Photos & Movies Library would collect links to every digital photo and digital video on your system.
"I should not care about location when I save," says Microsoft VP Chris Jones. "Why can't I just click on my computer and it shows me my documents? It is a computer. It should know what a document is, what I have edited and annotated, what I have searched for before, and what other places I have looked for documents. It is not just documents on my computer I am looking for. It is documents I care about