Use the Source Luke

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 29 Jan 2011 20:50:20 -0800, rusi wrote:

> On Jan 30, 9:21 am, Steven D'Aprano <steve
> +comp.lang.pyt... at pearwood.info> wrote:
>>
>> > I think this is a fairly accurate description of (one aspect of) the
>> > problem.
>> > If you dont see it as a problem how do you explain that google can
>> > search the World Wide Web better than we can search our individual
>> > hard disks?
>>
>> I fail to see any connection between the location that operating
>> systems store files, and the ability of Google to index publicly
>> available websites.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage#Content-
addressed_vs._Location-addressed


Nope, sorry, doesn't help. Both local files on your hard drive, and most 
remote websites on the Internet, are location addressed. Google indexes 
the content, but they don't provide content-addresses. Indeed, they 
*can't* do so (except, possibly, for content they control such as Google 
Books), since they can't prevent content owners from modifying either the 
location address or the content. And as I've mentioned, there are desktop 
utilities that index content for Windows and Macintosh. In fact, Google 
themselves offer a desktop app that does just that:

http://desktop.google.com/features.html



-- 
Steven