Competition is great eh?
Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are all in the thick of it for search capability.
The article the The Yahoo Factor in the MIT Technology Review talks about Yahoo being poised to capitalize on desktop and mobile search capability.
This quote sort of says it all -
"Without a very good search engine -- one that pulls information not only from the Web, but also from the repository of information stored on the computer -- the vast power of a networked culture goes untapped."
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The idea of a networked culture is powerful. I want to watch that video where Jean Paoli talks about XML again. It ties into the idea of networks making all electronic data accessible for intelligent use (as opposed to just making all electronic data accessible).
On the flip side.
There's an interesting anti-networking/web idea at work in some places. People are selling the idea of "Enterprise Portals". These folks aren't using the term portal ala AOL or MSN.com or something like that. These are sort of like silo-shaped information containers within an intranet, that are isolated from one another and from search engines. The idea (in the implementations I've seen) seems to be to break the web into pieces that are accessible only to people with proper credentials. Of course the capability to control access already exists using much finer tools that work on a site, page or document basis, rather than the "break the web into pieces" portal idea, but that doesn't seem to phase the people selling this idea.
Wikipedia has a brief explanation of the concept of Enterprise Portals.
Unless you have had an opportunity to see the harm these "Portals" can do to an intranet this discussion is pretty meaningless.
So I'll cut it short.
Here's how they work from one users perspective. Assume you (and thousands of other employees where you work) need access to a particular document to do your jobs. Depending on where you fit in you might look at that document every day or every week or at some longer interval. Prior to "portalization" you could "google" for that document or just bookmark it. After "portalization" Google can't find it and neither can you without a lot of digging inside portals that are very counter-intuitive. The most ridiculous part of it is once you find where the document is stored....you can once again bookmark it. You just can't use a search tool to find it, so you have to hope it stays where it was and nobody creates a better version somewhere else on your web. Multiply that one document by the thousands on your web, and number of people in your company, and you can start to see the productivity harm this concept causes.
It's amazing what you can sell with a good Powerpoint.
