On Tuesday 07 October 2003 17:26, Bob Tilley (AT&T) wrote:
> Warning: This concept has not been investigated for feasibility.
>
> In response to the Storage (fom Gnome) concept, is it possible to
> "connect" a Linux file system to the Google search engine?
In theory yes, however you would just be representing the results in a
different manner. And as there are potentially millions of results from a
google query youd have to adapt the results in some manner to make them more
presentable. I dont really see the point as 99% of the results you get are
just html files.
> You would be able to enter a search: "music by Beethoven" or "messages from
> Donna". These queries would be passed of to a mini-Google, the universe of
> which would be your filesystem. It would then search among your music or
> your email, and deliver the results?
This is possible and has already exists in a variety of forms. The
implementation problems however are considerable. If you do a full such for
each query then the time to results could be considerable. Or alternatively,
you have to keep some indexed database of meta data, which means having both
a data base layer and the meta data itself. For some files like mp3s they
already contain metadata, so that isnt a huge issue. However you would have
to implement a metadata schema that covers all types of files (how can you do
a search for "images of a tree" for instance without very very complex image
analysis and AI object recognition, this is incredibly difficult and
something i have worked on in the past).
> I know this is a very basic question but much of the concept of "Storage
> for KDE" is beyond me at the moment.
Most of the hype about storage is its query mechanism rather than anything
else. It seems just to be a keyword search which picks up on the context of a
word in the query as well as the keyword itself. i.e it interprets "image of"
as "files of type image/*" rather than "files containing the word image".
Tom
--
^__^ | Tom Badran
(oo)\______ | Imperial College
(__)\ )\/\ | Department of Computing
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