Google, Yahoo and others are offering tools to allow users to search the contents of their desktop. Apple will offer this with OSX Tiger and Microsoft when Longhorn ever comes out. Seems something users really want and need.
It would be nice to offer similar facilities to users whose desktop contents reside on a NetApp Filer. While I expect the existing tools could be crawl users files from their desktop even if they're on NFS or CIFS shares, I expect they would be *very* inefficient.
There are already products for the Filer which can scan user files for virii. I'm guessing these don't run continuously, but rather when a file is added or it changes on the NetApp. It seems a search engine could do likewise, indexing or re-indexing the file when it was put on the Filer or changed, respectively. Then they could find their stuff quickly and easily.
A sophisticated search product could add value by clustering results into semantically related groups (e.g., a search on "space" might provide results grouped by concepts like "room", "geometry", "astronomy", "freedom"). Other advanced user interfaces could be imagined, including "fly-throughs" of related concepts and documents.
Do such products exist? I didn't find anything that looked relevant with a quick google.
Many thanks.