Citing a need for a search utility that performs “crawling, indexing, ranking and displaying”, the developers at KDE have announced their intentions of including a desktop search utility when the newest version of KDE is released. The reason for the creation of such a utility comes from the fact that the developers of KDE believe it’s easier to search for files on the Internet than it is to do so on home computers.
The model for this utility is the search engine Google, “which makes things easy to find even amongst billions of documents,” according to the notes taken at the KDE Contributor and Developer Conference. In an article that appeared on CNetAsia, it was revealed that the search utility would reside in the control panel and build on KDE’s current search ability.
Scott Wheeler, a Linux specialist who is active in KDE development, spoke at the KDE conference about the search utility. According to Scott, the motivation behind such a development lies here:
“In these days of desktop systems with hundreds of gigabytes of storage, millions of files, thousands of desktop settings and local area networks with dozens to thousands of nodes, we are rapidly approaching this threshold in desktop computing. Search serves as a means of simplifying these hierarchies and presenting them organized be relevance and attempts to make this data manageable again.”
With the acknowledgement of KDE’s desktop search utility and with Apple preparing the launch of Tiger, which will include Spotlight, it appears as if Microsoft’s latest operating system, Longhorn, which will feature an all new search utility, will be falling behind another one of their competitors.
The latest version of KDE should be available within the next 18 months. Longhorn isn’t expected until 2006, at the earliest. Although, according to Troy Wolverton of The Street, if Longhorn is indeed released in 06, it will be missing their new filing system (WinFS), which is imperative to the success of their desired search application.
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest search news.
