[Sigia-l] the future of search

[Scott Berkun]

Actually, this exists in Windows XP. It's confined to each folder, but
the behavior is precisely as you described below. But no keywords -
filenames only.

For Example:

1. Go to the My Documents folder
2. Go to the address bar
3. Start typing in the name of a file

This feature was the outgrowth of a similar feature I worked on in
Internet Explorer (autocomplete for URLs). For the OS, anything beyond
individual folder searching was hard to justify. The goal was to
minimize file name typing errors, not to provide an extensive system
search facility. We did experiment with keywords and other variants,
such as partial string matches, but they all signifignatly effected
performance, and the rate of false positives climbed *quickly*.  And
since the Windows Search UI supported full text searching of documents
across the system, it was hard to justify building a separate but
different system for doing much of the same work. (Though it would have
been nice if the two experiences were more integrated than they are).

I'll have to check out iTunes and see what they did.

-Scott

Scott Berkun
Design & Usability Training Manager
Microsoft Corporation


-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew H Otwell [mailto:andrew at heyotwell.com] 
Sent: Friday, July 26, 2002 3:23 AM
To: sigia l asis.org
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] the future of search




>> Since we're all and a meditative mood anyhow, I thought I'd ask what 
>> you think the next radical innovation in search will be.

Raskin described at length a "predictive" search interface (not his
term, but close). This is the kind of thing you see in some Address Book
interfaces: as I begin typing A...N...D... etc, a list of results is
updating as I go, first listing all results beginning with A, then all
results beginning with AN, then all results beginning with AND.

Of course this shouldn't work _only_ for the first word of a name or
title, but for any keyword in any indexed field. Itunes does this
incredibly well with your MP3 collection: start typing the name of an
album, song, band, and you'll get a set of results that updates as you
type.

While that won't work for an Internet-wide search interface, it would be
nice to see more of it in confined spaces like the OS.

andrew

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