Desktop Search and Community Answers

I read this New York Times article yesterday on Tacit software’s Illumio product “Tacit plans to start testing the service, called Illumio, next month. The service allows the user to mine the data on the computers of friends, business associates and others with shared interests on any subjects”. I paritciularly liked this line “[Illumio] is preparing to pick the brains of friends and colleagues for opinions and expertise”. The service uses a question-based system and a reverse auction to find the best answer source for user-generated questions. I think this is an interesting Social Search approach as it combines two techniques currently gaining popularity. Namely desktop search and a community ‘question and answer’ --similar to Yahoo’s Answers (which is very good by the way). I personally have had problems with both of the desktop search products I have tried and subsequently had to uninstall them both but I like the idea and think this method has promise. We shall see.