November 12th, 2004

Find is the killer app

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:05 am

Categories: General

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Searching, as Joe notes below, is one thing.

The real "killer app" is find.

It’s the success of the "ultimate Linux app," Google, that has everyone and his rich uncle in Seattle going after this application.

Sometimes, as Jason Dowdell noted yesterday, even the rich uncle takes shortcuts. It’s understandable, almost forgiveable, when Google notes that it just doubled the size of its index.

The company formerly known as Lindows also sees search as a way forward, CNet reports, this time on the desktop.

Joe’s question remains. Why?

The answer, I think, lies in Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law of Storage (as I call it) shows hard drive capacities growing bigger-and-bigger, faster-and-faster. Many people never unload their drives, their caches, or their old stuff — at $1/gigabyte and declining why bother? (Most don’t even back it up, except perhaps to copy the drive.) All this is true, in spades, for Internet servers.

So better search algorithms, and a more accurate presentations of results, are both devoutly to be wished. Google concentrated on search to build an Internet business, but as hard drive sizes continue ratcheting out of control it seems the best route to building any business.

Find my stuff and I’ll give you anything, because I have too much stuff.