What about searching again?

Searching is a cornerstone of the online experience. Search is pretty darn good from the standpoint of googling for information, and google provides tools for programmatically accessing the google-dom, although google's api efforts are half-hearted to date. A note aside, if you haven't downloaded the http://toolbar.google.com/, you are missing out on a high utility offering.

But, search can deliver more, as evidenced by the increased industry focus on extending search support to local business listings, products, and pricing and purchasing information. on the product search front, if you haven't checked out Amazon's new book text search function, do so soon.

But there's one fundamental flaw to search from an information management perspective, and here is an area where the PIM fills the gap. By design, search-related activities end up in the 'get it and forget it' bucket, meaning that found information, if it's really useful, has to be re-searched a second and a third time. For the most part, this is no big deal since the cost of a new search is so low.

I am highly biased on this one, but the PIM must support near real-time filtering of information to quickly enable me to drill down to a specific subset of information (through text strings) that I am looking for. As someone once said to me, "how can google search the entire internet in under two seconds, but to find the stuff on my local hard drive takes five minutes and too often doesn't return what I was looking for?" to me, this suggests that there are strong synergies between how many different content types the PIM supports and how unified the meta-information model is across types. Such is the core of the PIM; namely, facilitating new ways of organizing content and information.

PIM must have key functions: search, save, organize, share, publish, play and transact.