pleeker - 11:42 pm on Oct 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

If it's a technical question, i'm more likely to hit newsgroups/blogs/message boards.

There's the rub. Google wants you hitting Google for that. :)

Not to get too far ahead of the game, but if we're going to start indexing the text of books to extract the 'information' from them for the purpose (presumably) of helping users find the information they seek ... what's next?

Web pages were obviously the first floor of this house, and images, PDFs, Word documents, etc., were added. The news search covers newspapers, magazines, etc. Blogs have been added. Now we're adding books to the mix. What other media will follow? Will the technology be developed to index the contents of audio and video files? Think of the information to be had in interview transcripts, etc.