Interesting things are happening in the metadata/search space these days. The reason why I refer to metadata is that search is reaching a limitation: it's only good at dealing with text file formats.

When we want to start searching binary files, there needs to be some textual information describing the file that we can search on, called metadata. Moreover, search engines need to support at least reading this metadata to build their indexes, and do scoring.

Then other applications need to be able to modify this metadata to make searching useful, somewhat of a chicken and egg problem. That metadata also needs to travel with the file from machine to machine, not only exist in a local database.

WinFS, which I think is safe to call the "metadata filesystem" has been delayed yet again, this time to 2008.

This signals that they are probably working on a more comprehensive change to the Windows file system that would, of course, take more time but be more revolutionary. It also indirectly points to a lack of fear that Google Desktop Search (GDS) will steal a lot of hearts and minds in the meantime.

Microsoft probably has a stop-gap competitor to GDS up their sleeve. They could release it as part of MSN Search and/or Windows Update but it wouldn't make them much money. It would, however, put them in a position to sell WinFS to people by creating more demand for better desktop search, which most people don't really care about today.

Update: Here's the stop-gap ... MSN Desktop Search.

Update 2: Yahoo joins Apple, Google and Microsoft in the already-crowded desktop search space. This got interesting really quickly...

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So in the future, metadata will play a more important role than it does today. This creates demand for applications that can modify metadata for different file formats (which may have to be custom to the type of file, like images/audio/video, etc). It also creates a demand for standards for metadata so that third party apps can actually write it and search engines can read it.