PHLAT is a project from Microsoft Research’s Redmond lab that attempts to streamline the process of sifting through the exponentially growing avalanche of information with which PC users must cope.

In a technical report entitled Fast, Flexible Filtering with PHLAT—Personal Search and Organization Made Easy, researchers Ed Cutrell, Daniel Robbins, Susan Dumais, and Raman Sarin set forth their goal and the reasoning behind it:

“We created PHLAT,” the document states, “with the desire to build and deploy an interface that would make finding personal information easy and intuitive no matter what users may remember about their content.

“We believe that personal search will be every bit as important in the evolution of [personal-information management] as Internet search has been for the World Wide Web.”

PHLAT grew out of an earlier project at Microsoft Research called Stuff I’ve Seen, which indexed content on a computer quickly and provided an interface to enable that content to be manipulated effectively. The Stuff I’ve Seen project provided the impetus for the development of Windows Desktop Search.