Google and search

OK, OK, I'm the last geek on Earth to figure this out, I know. Bear with me.

Google changed the way people find things. The old way was by location. The new, Google way is by content.

Most computer users from the pre-Google era find things by location. They think it's perfectly natural to have to assign a filename to every item of content they create, such as resume.doc. They also must remember that they put that item in My Documents\work\jobs\resume.doc. If they forget that location, it's tedious and difficult to recover the document.

Likewise, they're trained to put every e-mail they keep in whichever folder it belongs. This is a shame. I'd guess I look at each mail I receive an average of 1.001 times; in other words, I very rarely search for old mail. But if I filed every mail I'd incur the time and expense of filing each time, no matter whether I ever actually look for it.

Google, Gmail, and Google Desktop Search make filenames, domain names, URLs, and URIs much less important than before. Now, I can start naming all my Word files using the following scheme: 1.doc, 2.doc, 3.doc, etc., and I'll still be able to find them. If a tower-of-Babel moment occurred and all domain names were garbled, that's OK -- once Google updates its index, I'll still be able to find everything. And I never sorted my email to begin with, so I've simply become more productive since moving to Gmail.

Will the next desktop OS eliminate folders and filenames?