Finding an alternative method of getting into your data is becoming big business. Google is a perfect example, not only does their search engine provide the information in different ways, but the various extensions they have made to that information (Froogle, Google Local) have turned publicly available, but largely unformatted information into something that has structure and utility.

WinFS, which now now been Dropped from Longhorn, was going to offer a different way of accessing and referring to the information you store in files on your computer, and on others. Again, there have been different, and previous, attempts at this. Apple's Spotlight provides methods of searching the document, the comments and tags you add to documents and by other metadata attached to files.