2005 may be the year when tools for thought become a reality for people who manipulate words for a living, thanks to the release of nearly a dozen new programs all aiming to do for your personal information what Google has done for the Internet.

These programs share two remarkable properties: the ability to interpret the meaning of text documents; and the ability to quickly filter through thousands of documents. Together, these will have as significant an impact on the way writers work as the original word processors did.