Search Me?

Vermeer Technologies co-founder Charles H. Ferguson scores a once-in-lifetime I told you so in this month’s MIT Technology Review. Excerpts:

[T]he search industry cannot resist APIs, standards, and open architectures much longer. No single company can offer users all the functions they want. Users will demand search products and services that work across many different platforms

Today, a user cannot possibly conduct a search such as “Show me everything about the Chinese economy that has appeared in the last month in my e-mail attachments, Word documents, bookmarked websites, corporate portal, voice mail, or Bloomberg subscription.” Many computing platforms, old and new, have no useful search facilities at all. Most existing search tools are available on only one or at most a few platforms; and due to their lack of standardization, they cannot talk to each other.