In demonstrating Implicit Query, Dumais began to type an email asking a colleague about a set of slides for an upcoming conference. Before the message was complete, the program -- which appears in a window on the side of the screen -- pulled up emails, slide decks and Word documents containing the name of the conference and the future recipient. Each hit came with a brief summary of the internal content, date, the type of software the file was written in, and its potential relevance, among other information.
By incorporating this functionality into existing applications, users could more easily obtain attachments. Dumais recalled once writing a note to inform a colleague that a link on one of her group's sites was broken. Before sending, Implicit Query then showed her an unopened email in her in-box that contained a fix.
Stuff I've Seen essentially conducts the same type of searches, but it doesn't work automatically. Some commercially available systems, such as Apple Computer's Sherlock and Microsoft's own Finder, already perform some limited indexing functions, but Stuff I've Seen covers a broader array of files, including earlier accessed Web links and emails, according to Microsoft's published papers.
Memory Landmarks, meanwhile, is a mnemonic device recently developed at Microsoft Research. The application examines a chronological list of search results and then inserts landmarks that might help individuals more rapidly pinpoint the results they seek.
If a major election took place in November, for example, or an individual downloaded an inordinate number of pictures in December and put them in a file entitled "Vacation," small windows noting these significant events appears on the side of the search results. Lines connect the graphic to a point in the results, sort of like a display of tree-ring dating in a natural history museum.
Work in progress
Of all three applications, Stuff I've Seen is by far the most advanced, but work remains. For the application to function, all the data on a given hard drive has to be indexed, which can be a drag on performance.
Finalising an interface also remains on the to-do list. Do people want the tool bar on the side, or on top? And which buttons should go first? Those are some of the questions Microsoft is currently discussing, Dumais said.
Dumais' group, for instance, recently discerned through user interviews that people generally want to view documents sorted by date more than rank of importance. Names are big in queries.
"Date", however, is an evolving concept. In email, the operative date is the day the message was sent. In meetings, it's the day the meeting took place. An early version that categorised meetings by the date the meetings were originally scheduled generated complaints about perceived bugs in the first few hours it went out.
One of the current projects is studying a group of individuals who have become acclimated to using Stuff I've Seen to the point that they don't store documents in segmented files anymore.
"We're calling it Flatland," Dumais said. "We are now working with these people to try to understand what it is to live [there]."
