Researchers and speakers at the New Paradigms for Using Computers Conference, held at IBM's Almaden research lab last week, all agreed that search tools need to be refined to make it easier to digest information or conduct queries.
Attempts to better locate the world's information are already under way. The University of California at Berkeley displayed at the conference a prototype of a search engine called Flamenco that makes it easier to search for works of art or antiques. Software giant Microsoft, which plans to add better search features to a future version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, due sometime around 2006 or 2007, demonstrated a more general Web search service that is also in development. Apple, on the other hand, said that Apple's Tiger, a new version of the company's Mac OS X operating system due next year, will also include a new search engine called Spotlight that will allow Mac users to quickly search and find any file.
