[Sigia-l] the future of search

[Andrew H Otwell]

>> 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