What’s the latest buzz-word in the computer world? No, (although you couldn’t tell it from my latest series of articles) it’s not “iPod”. It’s not “Windows Media Center”. Nor is it “spyware”.

It’s “searching”. In other words, how can I keep track of the ever-increasing mound of stuff I’m acquiring on my computer and its broadband connection? How can I quickly and effectively access information on the Internet that I’m interested in?

Why the new interest in searching? “Browsing” has become, well, blasé. We’ve “progressed” past the active act of browsing to the more passive act of searching. Browsing takes time, which, of course, we don’t have enough of. Searching is fast and efficient. As computers and the Internet get faster and smarter, keeping track of the stuff we have and the stuff we want but don’t have yet will get faster and smarter as well. We’ll look at the search revolution over the next few weeks.

First, some general background information. By definition, searching for something means you never knew where it was, or, at one time you knew where it was but you forgot. Obviously, the more care you take to keep track of things when you create them, the more likely you’ll be able to find them later.

Think about organizing your Desktop – no, not the metaphorical desktop on your computer – but the actual Top of your Desk. Some people approach their desktops as “pilots” – they pile it here, pile it there. The more organized among us keep current stacks of stuff on their desktops, while moving older stuff out of sight into filing cabinets. The extremely organized among us create hierarchical filing systems. All right. “Hierarchical” is a big word. Don’t roll those eyes yet – give me a chance.

Let’s say you want to store and have quick access to your important stuff (like documents, photos, and music). You buy a three-drawer file cabinet from your local office superstore, which becomes the highest level of your filing hierarchy. To fit it into a computer metaphor, think of the file cabinet as “C:Drive”, “My Computer”, or “Macintosh HD”. Now, you could just throw all your stuff into the drawers of the cabinet and be done with it. Out of sight, out of mind. But you don’t, as you know that every time you need to find a specific item, you’ll have to sort through everything in the three drawers, which will take a long time.

To avoid that, you decide to store documents in the top drawer, photos in the middle drawer, and music in the bottom drawer. Ah hah. You’ve just created another level of hierarchy. In the computer metaphor, you just created “My Documents”, “My Photos”, and “My Music”. The “path” to the folders, in computerese, would be: My Computer > My Photos.

Now, inside the “My Photos” folder, you place envelopes (sub-folders in computer lingo) containing the photos you’ve taken, organized by the date you took the photos. Bingo! There’s another level of hierarchy. The Path would be: My Computer > My Photos > 2Nov04, for example.

This “big to small” approach, from all your stuff to just an individual document or photo, is the hierarchical approach used in the file systems of all computer operating systems. While some systems (and rightfully so for some users) will try to “heavily influence” where and how you decide to organize all your stuff, you can always come up with your own plan.

Next time we’ll talk about what you can do at the “point of conception” to help find a document later.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski