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Yahoo Releases Desktop Search Tool Beta

Posted by timothy on Tue Jan 11, 2005 07:59 PM
from the beta-would-be-a-great-name-for-software dept.
Software IT
Rolan writes "Yahoo! has released to BETA their Desktop Search Tool. It has a much longer list of file types that it will search, including compressed files, than the Google Desktop Search Tool. Though, the usefulness of a good number of those file types would come into question for most people."
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  • Yahoo! Says, "Me Too!" -- Again (Score:5, Informative)

    by savagedome (742194) on Tuesday January 11 2005, @08:02PM (#11329306)
    Motley Fool has a write up about YDS.

    http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2005/mft05011117.htm [fool.com]

  • Yet another desktop search tool (Score:4, Insightful)

    by albn (835144) on Tuesday January 11 2005, @08:02PM (#11329314) Journal
    MSN, Yahoo and Google have the desktop search tools. Now everybody will follow suit. That's all fair and good, but isn't that why your OS has a "search" tool? I do not see the usefulness of a tool and will open you up to more problems than you need....
    • I wish Google had named their product Google Desktop Find. After it is finished indexing, it doesn't really 'Search'.

    • Re:Yet another desktop search tool (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sH4RD (749216) on Tuesday January 11 2005, @08:07PM (#11329363) Homepage
      Hmmm...I assume you mean Windows? Well Windows has a picture editing program, but I don't see you using that do I? Competition == good, almost always. If the search companies want to compete with MS, more power to them. If MS wants to sit back and let the search engines compete, more power to them. In the end a better product will result. You already install your new picture editor when you install Windows, so why not install your new search too? (Oh, and a note: MS is not sitting back. They own MSN after all.)

    • Re:Yet another desktop search tool (Score:4, Insightful)

      by EnronHaliburton2004 (815366) on Tuesday January 11 2005, @08:08PM (#11329381) Homepage Journal
      That's all fair and good, but isn't that why your OS has a "search" tool?

      Well, the built in search tool for Windows isn't very good. It's slow, can't search (Some? All?) compressed files, doesn't have ranked search results, doesn't search your Outlook folders, and I need to turn off the stupid doggie every time I log into a new system.

      I haven't used any of these Desktop search tools, but the Google search mechanism is great, and I can definately see it being a useful tools. I won't use it because of the privacy concerns.

      I can't imagine why MSN has a desktop search tool... "Microsoft says that Microsoft's built in search tool 'sucks'..."
    • Just wait 'till they release a tool that allows you to display pictures right on your monitor. I bet you wont be so smug then eh?

      Oh, wait...

    • open source? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by weighn (578357) <(weighn) (at) (gmail.com)> on Tuesday January 11 2005, @08:15PM (#11329463) Homepage
      this isn't meant to be a troll, but has work begun on an open source desktop search tool?

      A quick peek at sourceforge makes me think no.

      • Or any other OS I have run across. KDE has a nice search tool, you can use "find" on slackware, and if you really want something to be useful for you,perhaps a BASH file to find your stuff when you need it?

        It is not just Windows. There is more than one way to skin a cat. Yes, competition is good, and they can do it all day long if they want to. I just do not see the usefulness of such a tool. If you find it useful, great.

  • Finally! (Score:4, Funny)

    by solowCX (796423) on Tuesday January 11 2005, @08:02PM (#11329315) Homepage
    I can search my collection of MacWrite II files!
  • Finally, someone has put out a desktop search tool that will index my JustSystems Ichitaro Versions 5.0 files!
      • When I was studying in Japan (just a couple of years ago), I saw nothing but MS Office anywhere... and as Wikipedia's entry [wikipedia.org] on it notes, the latest version (as of July) was Ichitaro 13.

        Ichitaro 5 is probably a late 80s-early 90s release. I doubt it has much, if any, market presence.
  • I find this desktop search too be a lot of hype and it's a tool I'm not all that interested in - the cost is too high. Open up the security of your machine to some external source... Not good IMO... Your security is as strong as its weakest link (granted in my case it's Winodws)...
    • I have to agree with that. If somebody is really interested in a web front end, could you just write something in your favorite language and at least know what you wrote?

      Then at least you can restrict access to only your machine. Again, why have that when you have a "search" tool already there.
      • Not only that, but what the heck's wrong with Microsaoft's index service that runs on XP? Yeah, it's limited, but it's more secure than sending information all over the net...

  • Cool (Score:5, Funny)

    by durtbag (694991) on Tuesday January 11 2005, @08:03PM (#11329328)
    I'm still waiting for CoolWWWSearch to come out with their desktop search utility.

  • Usefulness (Score:5, Interesting)

    by papadiablo (609676) on Tuesday January 11 2005, @08:05PM (#11329337)
    While it's an interesting subject to explore, I'm not convinced of the usefulness of this product. I installed the Google desktop search when it first game out, used it for about a week, and then stopped. Usually I know where things on my computer are, and don't need to search for them. But if I do need to search for them, chances are I will just use whichever application is appropriate to search for them. For instance, if I'm in Outlook and I want to find a mail about something then I'll search in Outlook. I don't want to switch to a browser to find emails. I don't know how applicable it would be for me to want to search through both email and other documents for the same thing. Anybody have some counter examples to share?

    • Re:Usefulness (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hal9000(jr) (316943) on Tuesday January 11 2005, @08:19PM (#11329509)
      Yep.

      I use Outlook and I can search for and locate Outlook emails in about 2 seconds. When I use Outlook search, I have to wait until it searches every single email and them presents them to me and here is the kicker, I can't do anything else while Outlook is searching otherwise the search stops. I have a couple of 1000 emails (I tend to keep deleted email for a long time and I rarely clean out my in box).

      Another use is that I have alot of files for work in My Documents that I refer back to often as far as a year or so. No amount of organizing is going to save me time locating stuff.

      The point is, computers are good at indexing and searching, I am not, so let the computer do the work.
    • The problem with Outlook search is that it can be incredibly slow if you have a bit mailbox. The search options are also limited.

      Going with Google search is a lot faster in this case. It's also convenient to see all possible results in one search location.

      Of course, there are security issues involved, but that's another story.
      • The answer to this is Lookout for Outlook.

        Basically does google type searching, very fast, and it adds right in. I use it almost daily.

        http://www.lookoutsoft.com/Lookout/
    • I have years of emails, and it takes a long time to do searchers in Outlook. Ironically, GDS is way faster and much better than outlook to search for email, I no longer use Outlook search which is slow and as mentioned by another poster stops me from other work I might be doing with that application.

      As it turns out, searching is a common OS like function that is justified to be outside of the individual apps. It's nice that you seem to have a good organization system for all your stuff, but I have so many

  • Forgot something? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mscnln (785138) on Tuesday January 11 2005, @08:06PM (#11329354)
    They spend their time deciphering file formats that haven't been used for 10 years, but they don't include AbiWord or OpenOffice whose file format is open??

  • OpenOffice.org/StarOffice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kosmosik (654958) <konrad@kosmosik. n e t> on Tuesday January 11 2005, @08:07PM (#11329372) Homepage
    I can't understand why it does not index OOo/SO documents? Those formats are *open* and well documented. Or FireFox/Mozilla bookmarks/mail/history - it is also open and documented - I bet the community is also willing to help when they (Yahoo developers) have some issues with that. Also probably it is more common than some obscure DOS editors...

    In my office we use only OOo (but on Windows) FireFox and Thunderbird - we have crafted some rather nice services including central databases with LDAP export to email clients, custom web apps running exclusively with FireFox (XUL-based), OpenOffice.org is connected to databases also, all server infrastructure is running Linux (Fedora) and lowlevel stuff (DNS, routing, FW etc.) is working on OpenBSD...

    So - having desktop search tool that will allow to index that (OOo/Mozilla) will be usefull to us. Todays offering simply suck as they go indexing only some expensive and crappy formats that some expensive and ureliable software produces...
  • Has anyone found a win32 search tool that indexes your browser cache? Is that not probably the single most useful potential feature of these tools?

    If I want to search my email/My Documents/messenger history I can do that either with the appropriate client or a basic file search (albeit not indexed, but normally that's not an issue).

    Why are the search providers not addressing page cache/history? Is there a firefox plug in that achieves this? I just want a "look in pages" checkbox next to the history search
  • C'mon, it's gzipped text, what could be easier?

    Maybe the guys who did the filter for "StarOffice Write for Windows and UNIX Version 5.2 (text only)" never heard of OOo? :-)

  • w00t (Score:5, Funny)

    by tuxter (809927) on Tuesday January 11 2005, @08:10PM (#11329399) Journal
    Google - "w00t"
    MS - "w00t"
    Yahoo - "w00t"
    Google - "Ah, fuck it!"

  • Lacking (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Docrates (148350) on Tuesday January 11 2005, @08:11PM (#11329412) Homepage
    What I need is for these tools to look into email headers, so that if I'm looking for information regarding "contract negotiations with Xerox" it will look into the "to:" line in the message header (@xerox.com) even if the message doesn't mention the company's name. The fact that this feature's not there yet has been the source of at least 50% of all failures by google desktop to find what I'm looking for. Yahoo doesn't seem to fix this either.

    And before all those "what do you need this when you have the windows search tool" posts start popping up... two words: indexing and content (as in the content of files, not just the filename.
    • My solution to this is pretty damn simple (and platform independent)... I archive all my emails to individual files where the file name is composed of the Subject, To/From address, and time stamp. So I can search for any of my communications, on any platform, just by looking through a directory listing. Efficient, fast. This is also the format used by the jbmail [pc-tools.net] mail client for archiving emails.
    • grep -i to:.*xerox\.com ~/Maildir/cur/*
      HTH, HAND.
    • And before all those "what do you need this when you have the windows search tool" posts start popping up... two words: indexing and content (as in the content of files, not just the filename.

      The built in Windows search tool allows you to search content of files.
  • If you list support for "executables", aehm, doesn't that meant that the search tool just does the indexed equivalent of 'strings filename | grep "searchterm"'? That makes me wonder about the quality "support" for some of the file formats, too.
  • The Yahoo product is just the old X1 .. nothing new here, move along folks.

    All these products have one thing in common - they're aimed at very basic searching suitable for the home user. They're not professional grade search products, like for example, ISYS [isys-search.com]. There's a world of difference between a freebee home product and a professional tool, both in terms of feature set and price point. We compete against free search tools every day of the week, and beat them routinely. The only time we don't is when the

  • I just RTFA (I know, I know)--why is this the first I'm hearing about AskJeeve's desktop search?!?!? :-)
  • YDS has a very clean interface with a nice large preview pane, something i disliked in Copernic (small and cluttered at the bottom). Although, I don't think it is the best... it has no specification of which files to index and where from?! i can't specify the directories and probably it also always index Outlook and Outlook Express??? I don't use it.

    On un*x/linux (mono) I like Beagle very much... it can become VERY promising.
  • I'm not sure I understand what yahoo or google have to gain from this product. It appears to me this is more a proof of concept than a tool. Could this be the groundwork for some future invasion of privacy?
    • The problem is that most people fail to use descriptive directory and file names. If you use very descriptive file names, you will find that you can efficiently locate any file you need without resorting to a nasty/expensive file content cataloging operation. I'm working on a cross platform file search tool [pc-tools.net] that is optimized for finding files by file name; faster than any of these 'desktop search' programs of course.
    • Desktop search tools create an index of your files' content which makes searching files almost instantaneous.
    • I wouldn't mind seeing InDesign or GoLive in there, since both can legitimately contain lots of text. I'm a bit surprised to see Photoshop and Illustrator in there, but the support seems pretty useless since Photoshop support is version 4 only (current version: 8) and Illustrator support stops at version 9 (current version: 11).

      The inclusion of lots of old DOS formats seems pretty gimicky (as opposed to useful), although it seems they just took whatever file formats the people they licensed the technology

    • It's in the FAQ ( http://desktop.yahoo.com/faq [yahoo.com]):

      Yahoo Desktop Search ... gives you control to change those settings including:

      • Only index files that are explicitly marked for indexing
      • Only index specific file types and not index others
      • Only index files under a specific file size
      • Configure indexing options on a directory by directory basis, including:
      • Never index
      • Index only filenames and sizes
      • Index filenames, sizes, and file contents

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