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Microsoft's Search Engine Plans
prostoalex writes "Andy Beal from SearchEngineGuide.com interviews Robert Scoble from Microsoft. Scoble tells the audience what current search technologies Microsoft is working on as part of its Longhorn/WinFS development as well as in the field of Internet. Scoble also discusses current problems with local drive and Internet searching, such as absence of metadata for a lot of files out there: "When I take pictures off of my Nikon, they have some metadata (for instance, inside the file is the date it was taken, along with the exposure information) but that metadata isn't useful for most human searches. For instance, how about if I wanted to search for "my wedding photos?" Neither X1, nor Windows XP's built in search would find your wedding photos. Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos.""
Make it "Micosoft Search powered by GOOGLE". Then "maybe" it might function well. Also metadata needs to be created by the user, I aint gonna be entereing data on a keypad on my camera for every photo.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
I can get around searching for "wedding photos" because I remember the date. 3 special days, and hundreds of wedding photos appear.
It's part of being human that we don't necessarily remember the phrase "wedding photos" but we may remember many other tiny pieces of data about a shoot that are unique to us, and the time and date are one of those. I can be certain the post 9pm photos done on those days are pretty embarassing.
Just concentrating on "Wedding Photos" is useful if someone else is searching my picture archive, but that's not useful to me
nude geekgrrls
For instance, how about if I wanted to search for "my wedding photos?" Neither X1, nor Windows XP's built in search would find your wedding photos. Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos."
That's why you can change filenames and organize things into directories.
X1, nor Windows XP's built in search would find your wedding photos. Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos.
Right, dude! The camera should automagically recognize that it's taking pictures of your wedding and include that info in the metadata!
I think thats what "organization" is for. You place files like "DSC0001.jpg" in things called "folders", and then name the folder "Wedding" or something.
I dunno.
Bowie J. Poag
What happened to thumbnails?
This whole longhorn winfs thing seems like a big technological advance to me ...
...
Manualy adding metadata to each of your 200+ wedding pictures looks so smarter than just creating an old fashioned directory "wedding pics" and moving them into it
I can't wait to start using this wonderful FS
search for "best OS" find Microsoft
search for "viral software" find Linux
search for "secure" find Windows XP
search for "handsome smart guy" find Bill Gates
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
So instead of offering their official toolbar for IE only (the one for Mozilla is unofficial), start to slowly phase out the Google Toolbar and replace it with the Google Browser which would basically be a Google branded Mozilla Firebird. With all the features that make Firebird great like Tabbed Browsing, with the addition of the Google Toolbar features such as PageRank, etc. All on a cross platform basis.
If people get used to downloading better browsers now, then they won't even notice when the next release of IE starts to reject the Google Toolbar.
Let them know what you think
If users didn't suck so much, then descriptive dir names would easily solve the problem of trying to locate a wedding photograph on a hard drive.
So what, the image file is named "DSC0001.JPG" -- who cares. Put it in a folder named "my images" and there's no wonder you can't find it!! Put it in a folder named "wedding photos", and then you've got something there!
The best way to describe it to the average joe (non)user is that directories/folders are analogous to folders in a filing cabinet. Would you file telephone bills, for example, under "mortgage" or "telephone"?
Thanks Microsoft for "my photos", and "my documents", and the like. We appreciate it!
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Phil Greenspun has a similar idea and is looking for help on how to accomplish this on a personal level with existing the Windows XP filesystem. Check out his blog post for details. There's already an intersting discussion taking place in the comments for that post.
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
I hope the industry sees the opportunities that Longhorn's WinFS opens up. We can either work together and share data with each other, or we can be afraid and keep data to ourselves.
Share data? with whom? how can you share data that is in either proprietary format or "patented XML" ???
It is following the OpenStandard that will help in "working together and sharing data".
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos.""
d aylight...horizon?), you've got more issues than just locating a particular photo.
You mean to say you don't know the date you got married? You're in trouble.... iPhoto on OS X at least breaks them out into folders according to either last imported and/or month/year etc.. You're responsible to breaking them down further, in which case you don't search the entire drive later, you simply open iPhoto and take a short trip to your wedding folder, just like having a folder in a drawer in a cabinet in your home.
It's not really that hard, now is it? if you're dropping any files onto your drive randomly, the issue is with your basic housekeeping, not that a top level search tool seems blind to your target.
You're talking about EXIF, and the list of data there is long. Why you took the picture isn't part of it, and if you want the camera to interpret which part of the subject matter is root (noses..faces...age...sex...background..,trees...
Would you want to trust your private data, gathered from govenment departments, purchases and financial transactions etc, being accessed by such a system run by any old govenmental or business agency?
How about your private correspondence on friends and acquaintances home computers.
Microsoft culled the URL name:password@ functionality from Internet Explorer because it claimed it could not create a secure enough fix, yet in the same month, it yet again proposes a privacy nightmare such as this? Madness.
WinFS sounds promising, but unless Microsoft makes the WinFS specs open and free, it'll be yet another lock-in technology, which would be very dissapointing.
Adding metadata to all your files would require a lot of time and effort, and if it's a closed technology, it'd be yet another reason people wouldn't want to even attempt switching to another OS. I can almost hear it now...
"This other OS looks cool, but I've spent so much time adding metadata to all my files, and I can't export that metadata to this other OS because the format is proprietary and patented... I'd better stick with Windows, switching OS's would be too hard..."
Sorry, someone had to state the blatantly obvious. As usual, all promising technologies coming out of Microsoft are poisoned. And most people don't even realize it. Not even intelligent people. Most .NET developers don't even realize that .NET's so-called "standardization" via ECMA doesn't really make it an open standard (lots of the "standardized" .NET technology is encumbered by patents).
-Teckla
Judiging from the interview, the "innovative" Longhorn seems to allow you to add metadata in a slightly user-friendly way. But virtually nobody will use it, except maybe to mark a few important files which you have stored in a special place anyway.
So what would be a better solution then? My idea is that metadata should be added automatically. For instance, a human will recognize most wedding photos for what they are. Getting a computer to recognize this is not trivial, but lots of research is currently invested in this. Already computers can easily recognize general categories ("groups of people", "nature", "animal", "portrait"). My guess is that it is already possible to implement a system that you can train to let the computer recognize your particular brand of photos.
I don't expect Microsoft to try to go into this way of innovation. They will probably wait until an entrepeneur develops it and then copy it or buy them out.
I once made the mistake of working with these files under Windoze. After I was done, all the EXIF information had been removed. You can imagine how mad I was.
So what is Microsoft going to do? Fix this bug and call it a feature?
-Rick
"Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos."
Metadata is a stupid concept. It puts the cart before the horse. Files should not have to 'know' about themselves, they are not objects.
You have to treat files as just files, their names are nothing more than identifiers, their contents are nothing more than contents.
By all means its possible to build a great search capability into a filesystem, but you need to build the 'meta' data _outside_ the file.
A system built on file metadata is doomed to be incompatible with anything but the latest datatypes designed for it.
Used to be if you wanted to find a file real fast under windows, you'd hit WINDOWS+F to pullup the find window, enter in your search query, and Go.
Now if you're in front of an XP machine and want to find say...all the pictures on the system you can't just enter in "*.JPG" anymore. You have to read what some animated dog is asking you, click on one of the options before you get to the search query window, then enter in the query. doesn't sound like much of a hassle, but it IS an extra step.
$cat
I use Windows (duck) and it preserves my metadata fine.
"Neither X1, nor Windows XP's built in search would find your wedding photos. Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos."
Metadata will NEVER improve searching in this way unless the things that generate the content FORCE you to put it in before they can snap pictures, etc...
Even if people were forced to put metadata into all their files there is a big chance that typos and other errors in entering the info would occur. This will make the metadata totally useless in a search!
It's saved my bacon more than once. As we move away from text, we become completely dependent on metadata to find things. Standards for metadata need to be settled soon, or Moore's law means our computers will become less and less useful.
--Mike--
How many people have trouble finding files on their hard drive using the most basic search criteria. People who are so unorganized as to lose files on their hard drive are probably not sophisticated enough to use advanced search methods successfully.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
"As we move away from text, we become completely dependent on metadata..."
Exactly what do you think metadata is? This system would require more text than current. At present, you can rename the files and put them in folders, which works quite well if you have any organizational ability. Metadata would require dozens of unrelated pieces of info be input, and the a more complex retrieval (search) process would be required. While metadata standards are important, it's only advanced users who will be using them. How many "typical" users do you know that are going to search for a photo by the F-value?
And for the record, I've never used the "containing text" search, because I name files in unambiguous ways.
G
In KDE you can allready select an image file and say select "Find similar images". provided you have indexed your images using GIFT (Gnu Image Finding Tool)
You can search images both in your own GIFT database and databases on the internet.
So to solve the wedding photo problem you could make a drawing similar to your photos and search for similar images.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
This is more useful than it would seem. I've read a bunch of posts that talk about keeping the wedding pictures in a folder called "Wedding", and that's the extent of the organization.
Except it doesn't work that way. If I dig around a little, I see that I have the same images in several places: in the folder called "Vacation", another folder called "work" where I did some touchups, another folder called "staging" where I laid things out before putting them on the server, and again on the server, where my family can view them on the web.
If I follow the suggestion of putting them all into a single folder, then I've created a logistical headache. The _only_ thing I've gained is the ability to find all the files at once. Using metadata, I would no longer have that restriction - I could put files where they made the most sense, and still find all the files at once.
Ever look at the properties page of an MS Office file? There's enough metadata tags in there to keep you busy for hours.
Does anyone really fill those in? Rarely.
Is there a method to search on them? Never looked.
Sometimes it's interesting to browse the properties page to see who really created a spreadsheet or document. For example, people who shamelessly "borrow" templates from former employers and either aren't smart enough or too lazy to do just a little clean up. But that's about it.
Ever tried to search for Xfree86 on search.msn.com?
Stefan
ACDsee, a well-known and, at one time, free, image viewing and organising app, supports metadata. It puts it in a "descript.ion" text file in each directory. This is an ancient DOS standard. It's still supported by a few Windows apps, notably the Far manager (a shareware clone of Norton Commander for Win) and ReGet, a downloader; both Russian.
In fact I find the "descript.ion" metadata so useful I stick with apps that use it. At my last job, a web news site, I organised out image library using ACDsee and this metadata to add notes. ACDsee also has a nice batch rename.
No need to invent a whole bloody new file system to find your wedding photos.
Doesn't storing your photos in hierarchical folders labeled appropriately count as metadata? I know it's not very flexible or powerful, but it's metadata of a sort. Store your wedding photos in a wedding folder in a photos folder.
Now, if you're talking about a database of metadata about files, then that's something else.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Apple has a solution to this, which has trade-offs, but seems pretty functional.
Essentially, each of their iLife apps is a replacement for the Finder. Do we really need music search integrated with file search? Or is it sufficient to build independent metadata (ID3) and filestructure (playlists) just for music. That's really the brilliance of iTunes in that it never takes you back to your HD filestructure. You can even ask it to maintain the HD filestructure to reflect the metadata structure, so it'll keep everything in an artist/album/song structure, naming things as needed.
iPhoto is set up the same way, but it's pretty apparent that the iPhoto guys are the 'B' team, since they haven't gotten it nearly as slick as iTunes yet, but it also has the equivalent of content metadata, playlists, and smart playlists. So, yes, I can easily find my wedding photos. The trade-off is that you can't search for 'Wedding' in the Finder and get wedding photos, wedding songs, etc. Maybe that's upcoming, but I'm not totally convinced of the value.
The iTunes organizational structure does carry into iPhoto, so if you want to select a song for a slideshow in iPhoto, you can see your iTunes playlists, and filter against metadata. It also carries into iMovie, etc.
Other posters have clearly identified the problems with metadata. File organization is generallly only useful if you are willing to symlink across all of your metadata, otherwise your photos of you mom and your wedding photos are disjoint, since some should be in both places. The single biggest problem with metadata is putting it in to begin with. iPhoto now allows you to do that during photo import - using a slide-show type UI.
I think MSs tendency to do everything in one place is interesting, but tends to not come off so well. Having everything in SQL could eliminate one of the shortcomings in Apple's implementation which is that they need to maintain an XML intermediate structure for music files, photos, etc. While somewhat handy, it's main function is to join file metadata and the FS, which means that it is somewhat fragile.
I think it's cool that Microsoft is taking cues from the iApps - interesting that they want to integrate it so much into the operating system. Whereas so far Apple is stressing an application-centered solution on top of a more general-purpose filesystem, Microsoft is getting deeper into the integration game, getting into file metadata a la BeOS, and tracking files according to thematic relevance a la relational databases.
If the "smart desktop" idea catches on it will be interesting to see the response from developers on Mac OS X and Linux, as far as offering intelligent activity tracking. Somehow I see a twisty maze of documents and activities, all alike.
Should operating systems do all the work of organizing users files for them, concealing the filesystem behind a database veneer, or behind a purely task-oriented veneer? Should this kind of thing be left to application developers, like the maker of Path Finder?
Wouldn't Windows be more useful if it was a truly modular system that could be configured simply by stripping away unwanted components? Isn't that what makes Darwin so healthy in the enterprise market today?
-- thinkyhead software and media