When everything is searchable
Eric Brewer · Communications of the ACM · 2001
After communication, search is the most visible and important aspect of the Internet. The Internet's technical elegance is its anarchy and freedom of information sharing; everyone can add information and express his or her views. Search is also one of the aspects of the Internet that makes it fundamentally different from previous media; interactivity is the other obvious one. There is a plausible argument that search capabilities in the broadest sense have led to increased overall productivity by millions of workers, and thus to recent global economic expansion. In looking at the future of the Internet search, the author focus on four areas that will affect human lives in the coming decades. These are integration of textual search and database technologies; distributed repositories; context; and integration with the physical world. The article concludes that search is the fundamental solution to anarchy and information chaos. In the longer term, the full expression of the power of search depends on the use of context and on exploiting the continuing integration of the Internet into the physical world.