Introduction

The rate of growth in the storage capacity of desktop PCs has been quite extraordinary, with the standard hard drive in a PC being 160 Gb; even in a laptop the standard capacity is 40 Gb. At the same time the number and size of documents being created and stored on a local drive has been increasing at a similar rate – a sort of electronic Parkinson's Law that states that the volume of documents increases to match the memory capacity available. Marshalling all this information into a folder structure is well beyond the capabilities of most of us, as the sheer rate of change in business requires new folders and files to be created without leaving any time to reorganize the existing array. The end result is that it is impossible to find all relevant documents (including e-mails) when responding to a request for information or commencing work on a new document.

Windows XP does have a search feature, but this string-searches files and is a very slow process. For several years there have been indications that Microsoft was planning to launch a more sophisticated search feature in its Longhorn desktop product. This is now called Vista, and by the time this book is published more information should be available on this feature.

Ahead of this a number of the public web search companies launched desktop search software that would build an index of the documents on a hard drive, with Yahoo! and Google being among the early leaders. Over the last two years many other companies have joined the market, and there is now a wide range of products available; these are listed in Table 8.1. These all enable users to index files on their own PCs and laptops, and also on shared public drives.