9. A method of dynamically interfacing with a search engine comprising: displaying a user interface including a query pane for receiving user input and a results pane for displaying the results of a query for local data on a computing device; displaying a property tiles pane in said user interface, said property tiles pane including a plurality of property tiles, each of said property tiles including a property pane, each of said property panes including one or more active filters, at least one of said one or more active filters is a user-created or user-edited active filter; receiving user input via an active query box displayed in the query pane, wherein said user input is separated into individual search terms and combined into search phrases, wherein a new search term or a new search phrase is separated from a previous search term or a previous search phrase by placing it in a new line; in response to said active query pane receiving user input, automatically generating a search engine query a data corpus comprising of a plurality of file types and having metadata related to at least one of a property of a datum of the corpus, a subject matter of a datum of the corpus, or a custom user tag of a datum of the corpus, based at least in part on at least one automatically derived property, subject matter, or tag of a datum of the corpus determined at least in part from the said user input without requiring additional user action, said automatically derived property, subject matter, or tag of a datum of the corpus not being identical to said user input; displaying a word-wheel pop up when the results of said query cause said search engine to return a word-wheel; wherein the word-wheel suggests words or phrases that correspond to metadata related to the search terms, and wherein the metadata contains proper values which include at least one of the derived properties, subject matter, tags, and results from the active filters; and displaying the results of said search engine query, if any, in said results pane.
9. A method of dynamically interfacing with a search engine comprising: displaying a user interface including a query pane for receiving user input and a results pane for displaying the results of a query for local data on a computing device; displaying a property tiles pane in said user interface, said property tiles pane including a plurality of property tiles, each of said property tiles including a property pane, each of said property panes including one or more active filters, at least one of said one or more active filters is a user-created or user-edited active filter; receiving user input via an active query box displayed in the query pane, wherein said user input is separated into individual search terms and combined into search phrases, wherein a new search term or a new search phrase is separated from a previous search term or a previous search phrase by placing it in a new line; in response to said active query pane receiving user input, automatically generating a search engine query a data corpus comprising of a plurality of file types and having metadata related to at least one of a property of a datum of the corpus, a subject matter of a datum of the corpus, or a custom user tag of a datum of the corpus, based at least in part on at least one automatically derived property, subject matter, or tag of a datum of the corpus determined at least in part from the said user input without requiring additional user action, said automatically derived property, subject matter, or tag of a datum of the corpus not being identical to said user input; displaying a word-wheel pop up when the results of said query cause said search engine to return a word-wheel; wherein the word-wheel suggests words or phrases that correspond to metadata related to the search terms, and wherein the metadata contains proper values which include at least one of the derived properties, subject matter, tags, and results from the active filters; and displaying the results of said search engine query, if any, in said results pane. 11. The method of dynamically interfacing with a search engine as claimed in claim 9 further comprising: in response to additional user input automatically generating a further search engine query based on said additional user input without requiring additional user action; and displaying the results of said further search engine query, if any, in said results pane.