Universal search – the ability to search for content across sources – is one of the holy grails of consumer content management. Over the last 5-6 years search has improved significantly and become more ubiquitous. Google Desktop is a great search tool across locally stored files. I’ve written in the past about Xobni and the ability to search and organize across email content (your inbox and archive files). Adding the link in the previous sentence was easily done using the search capabilities in the WordPress link tool.
Google – through Google TV – is (trying to) make a strong push into video content search. Crestron has been active here as well. @juliejacobson writes about a Crestron patent published a few weeks ago. The patent abstract describes the pantent as:
a method for obtaining a single set of media search results from a search of media sources. The method includes providing a search query, executing a search of each of the media sources for media based on the provided search query, generating results of the searches, and consolidating the results of the searches into the single set of search results that include a list of media items with associated metadata.
This is exactly what is needed in content management. Content is exploding across a myriad of sources and the ability to search across these sources with a single gesture is extremely limited. One of the greater obstacles thus far in this endeavor is that the approaches have been hardware-centric. In order to gain wide acceptance, I think universal search will need to take place across a number of devices. Services like Netflix have gained ubiquity because they are available across content-oriented devices. Universal content search will not reach a similar ubiquity until is is hardware agnostic.
