Some days ago I had the pleasure to play with an iMac
in a store (the one with the name similar to KDE :)
for a while. The most striking feature in the newer
versions of MacOS is "Sherlock", a search machine both
for the local file system (by various criteria or by
full text search a la glimpse) and a meta search machine 
for the web. Well, I immediately decided that such a 
program is a must-have for KDE.

You can get an impression of the code that I've written
up to now from

ftp://linde.physik.hu-berlin.de/pub/bernd/columbo.gif

Thanks to the impressive libraries like libkio and
libkhtmlw it's not very complex. Unfortunately, I
don't really have the time to do much further work
on it, and it's also not very easy to debug a web-
centered app over a modem ;-) So it would be nice
if others shared my enthusiasm and contributed to
this project to make it really useful. What is mostly
needed (apart from debugging, of course) is the 
definition of search sites. I've tried to make my
parser compatible with Apple's scheme, but with
config files based on KConfig. Ideally one would
have a config file parser that is compatible with 
Apple's plug-in syntax 
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1141.html.
(btw: how do I uncompress .hqx files?)

Of course, one can let one's fantasy run wild and
think about how Columbo could interact with other
applications. Imagine a menu item in the mail reader
that allows to search the archives of the mailing list!
Or a menu item in the news reader that initiates a
search on dejanews... Or an extension to the address-
book that queries an email search engine.

Bernd
(now seeing that it's time to go to bed...)