Personal KM in the New York Times

Interesting article on personal search engines: Humans vs. Computers, Again. But There's Help for Our Side.. The author highlights the growing problem of finding stuff on our PC's - stuff we know we already have, but can't retrieve efficiently. A comment on AOK put it well: when we were paper-based, chaotic filing was immediately apparent because the office looked a mess. Now we're electronic, few people see what a mess your hard drive is.

I'm intrigued by people's e-mail filing strategies. I like folders that match my drive folders (though their names keep diverging), others have 'July mail', 'June mail' etc. which works for them but would drive me nuts, some seem to rely entirely on search. None of these help unless you're certain it IS a mail you're looking for and not another file type.

The article lists some search engines that index your mail, files, contacts etc. so that search is much faster "ADM, askSam, BrainStorm, Chandler, Enfish, InfoSelect, iRider, Lookout, Onfolio, TheBrain and Zoot".

TheBrain is just weird, X1 looks good, but I'm a devotee of Enfish because it finds hits be they in mails, attachments, powerpoint or whatever. It seems to break easily, but, as testament to how I can't live without it, I've re-installed it 10 times now in the last 4 years.

Thanks to John Barrett of the AOK Ezine for spotting this.