Intelligent Searching in Longhorn

Here's what I want for the file system in Longhorn. I want the file search capabilities in Longhorn to be just as robust as web searching. Take, for example, Google. Wouldn't it be killer if you could Google your hard drive? (Google, are you paying attention?) Just by typing a search string in the IE address bar, something like “filesearch:mypicture.jpg”, you would run a local copy of the Google Engine, ported to the .NET Framework with a full XAML interface. Then, you'd get all the locations of the file, including details and possibly versioned histories if you're using Volume Shadow Copying or something like that. It would also be intelligent and say “Did you mean these files?” and give me a list of files that match based on a probability percentage range that I could choose.

Then, I wouldn't have to go to the Start menu, go to “Find”, then select “Files or Folders”, then type the name, blah blah blah. I got the idea because I had to search for a file, and my first inclination was to type my search terms in the address bar of the “Search Results” dialog (putting the address bar there was really lame, especially if it doesn't do anything).

You could make it even cooler by having the Google engine run locally and have queries run over Indigo, so you could search over your computer and the web simultaneously. It would be multi threaded, so that the searching was done independantly.... Google Desktop would handle the work locally of searching the files system and displaying all of the results.... the query over Indigo would bring back web results, and the contents of the file system would never be transmitted. Then, not only would Google Desktop search for files, but it would also search your Internet history and tell you if you've visited any similar sites, and show you the top 5 results based on the probability of all those factors. And, it would learn about your different search habits, both locally and remotely, and apply them to future searches.

But that's not all. Think about the possibilities in an intranet environment. Using Google Intranet, you could Google all the public folders across the network, using Indigo to create a P2P network similar to Kazaa, Overnet, and Skype, to interface with all the Google Desktops in the intranet. Then, IT Managers would also be able to search using Google IT, for not just files, but errant policy settings, logs, inappropriate files, etc.

Just a thought.

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