Long time readers may recall when I posted a thread on perfect search a year or so ago. I got so many wonderful answers, and I wove much of what I learned into my final chapter. This is a short excerpt from that chapter. Again, please send or post comments, corrections, clarifications - I already see a few things here that I would like to tweak...as usual...a book on topics like search is a never ending work...like a blog! Search Everywhere In the near future, search will metastasize from its origins on the PC-centric Web and be let loose on all manner of devices. This has already begun with mobile phones and PDAs; expect it to continue, viruslike, until search is built into every digital device touching our lives. The telephone, the automobile, the television, the stereo, the lowliest object with a chip and the ability to connect—all will incorporate network-aware search. This is no fantasy; this is simple logic. As more and more of our lives become connected, digitized, and computed, we will need navigation and context interfaces to cope. What is TiVo, after all, but a search interface for television? ITunes? Search for music. That box of photographs under your bed and the pile of CDs teetering next to your stereo? Analog artifacts, awaiting their digital rebirth. How might you find that photo of you and your lover on the beach in Greece from fifteen years ago? Either you scan it in, or you lose it to the moldering embrace of analog obscurity. But your children will have no such problems; their photographs are already entirely digital and searchable—complete with metadata tagged right in (date, time, and soon, context).1 But let’s not stop our digital fantasy train yet. It may sound farfetched, but in the future, your...

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