Longhorn Search

Chris Sherman at SearchEngineWatch talks a bit about Longhorn search and links to a Channel 9 video clip where you get some glimpses of how search is going to be implemented in Longhorn.  What’s clear right now is that they are:

1.     Planning for a search experience that operates at multiple levels, local, intranet, internet etc

2.     That at the local level integration and meta data is going to be key.  The example sited on the video goes something like this:  “find me all of the PowerPoint presentations, attached to meeting invites that I attended in the last month attended by someone from Shell”. This links together a lot of WinFS metadata.

3.     Interestingly almost every WinFS search scenario is based on integration of other things with Outlook, for example, “Where I was at a particular time”, information or contact information or email context.

4.     The next version of Outlook and its integration with WinFS and some sort of super journal in WinFS are going to be key

In my case, for now at least, I have settled on X1 for the following reasons:

1. I like to search in scopes, ie emails, files
2. The type down experience is great
3. The ability to filter based on the content of fields is ace
4. The preview window, Inside Out viewers, at the killer feature for me
5. They are planning to support Lotus Notes in the next version