I recently read (on CNet perhaps?) that anonymous people within Yahoo are promising one stop searching of web, email, hard disk and Yahoo services – sometime. I won’t get too excited about that until it gets close to launch.

Meanwhile, “X1”:http://www.x1.com/ (which admittedly costs $75) has been improving rapidly – it now supports boolean and proximity searching of your hard disk, contacts, email (including Eudora and other email apps as well as – and alongside – Outlook I am delighted to say) and email attachments. With those improvements I am going to start trying to use it again regularly. Download their trial version and/or “enter their sweepstakes”:http://www.x1.com/sweepstakes/index.html to win up to 50 copies.

For more on what Microsoft is up on this see “this post”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_search_engines.html#001134 and for Google’s plan’s “see here”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_search_engines.html#001119.

Update: Jeremy Wagstaff who shares my obsession with hard disk search has just posted a “discussion”:http://loosewire.typepad.com/blog/2004/08/the_new_search_.html of the race to provide good local search and a (probably comprehensive) “list of available programs”:http://loosewire.typepad.com/blog/2004/08/a_directory_of__2.html including three I have not yet tried – all free of charge – “Tukaroo”:http://www.tukaroo.com/, “Wilbur”:http://wilbur.redtree.com/index.htm (which is also open source) and “Blinkx”:http://www.blinkx.com/

Back and forth the pendulum of history swings. First the Aborigines in Australia were savages to be pitied, then they were victims who were pitilessly killed by white colonists – then 18 months ago Keith Windschuttle, a conservative historian wrote a stinging rebuke to those historians who strove to uncover the dark side of Australia’s history, claiming that they appear to have exaggerated or made up the evidence of those crimes. Not surprisingly, it has touched off “a furore”:http://www.sydneyline.com/.

The Australian brings us “up to date with the controversy”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10205639%255E28737,00.html in a manner rather sympathetic to Windschuttle. I don’t know whether he’s right or wrong but the Australian historical establishment’s seeming desire to circle the wagons and attack the man and the media rather than his allegations is un-edifying. It seems to be having the unfortunate effect of turning him into a “martyr among conservative bloggers”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=sydneyline.com.

I hope someone from the Australian historical establishment will come by and make a good case for why things are not as they have been painted by the media and Windschuttle himself…