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Yahoo Releases Desktop Search Tool Beta 191

Posted by timothy from the beta-would-be-a-great-name-for-software dept.
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 Releases Desktop Search Tool Beta More

Yahoo Releases Desktop Search Tool Beta

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  • Yahoo! Says, "Me Too!" -- Again (Score:5, Informative)

    by savagedome ( 742194 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @09:02PM (#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 @09:02PM (#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 @09:07PM (#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.)
    • isn't that why your OS has a "search" tool?

      What do you want, something that does the job easily, or the standard windows search tool?

      • 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.

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

      by EnronHaliburton2004 ( 815366 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @09:08PM (#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'..."
      • Windows xp search is downright broken.
        It can "sometimes" bring back the file you KNOW is on the drive, and sometimes completely miss it.
        Note, this is only searching by Filename, with no string parsing at all.
        MS made lots of areas out of action (windows folder is especially offlimits).

        THEN

        When you actually switch it to advanced mode, and start to dig in, it kicks you again.
        You enter a string contained within a file you know is on your computer, and you ask it to search for it.
        Granted, the old 95/8/2000 sea
    • Ah, lots of reasons. Windows search tool is pretty limiting. You can search the hard drive. Or I can search Outlook but those are seperate operations. Don't try to go back and read that email while searching Outlook using the Outlook tool because the search will end. And takes for ever to run.

      It doesnt' have really good boolean support. Lot's of reasons.

      I use Google Desktop because it supports the seraching I need to do (mostly microsoft files and Outlook) and it fast.
    • 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.gmail@com> on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @09:15PM (#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.

    • 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....

      The built in search in Windows XP is slow and does not carry the features these other tools have.

      If you are going to be marked Insightful for mentioning "problems" associated with this, I must ask: Does your Linux box have "locate" installed and do you cons
    • Ever tried to use Windows Search/"Find Files and Folders" to find text in even simple Unicode .txt files? It doesn't work, although commandline FIND works every time.

      No amount of complaining to Microsoft has seen this condition change since Windows NT 4.

  • Finally! (Score:4, Funny)

    by solowCX ( 796423 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @09:02PM (#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!
  • PDF is the only one i wanna see
    • 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

  • Honestly... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by rainman_bc ( 735332 )
    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...
        • Google's desktop search does *not* send your information all over the internet. It only seems that way to the clueless. Yes, I guess they're guilty of overestimating their customers.
          • Yes, and neither does the toolbar.

            Thanks but no thanks. Call me paranoid, but I have no need to trust in google like that.

            If I can find a replacement for google groups, I'd gladly give up my google usage.

  • Cool (Score:5, Funny)

    by durtbag ( 694991 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @09:03PM (#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 @09:05PM (#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 @09:19PM (#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.

    • Re:Usefulness (Score:2, Insightful)

      by dakirw ( 831754 )
      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.

      • Re:Usefulness (Score:2, Informative)

        by MrEnigma ( 194020 )
        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/

        • Re:Usefulness (Score:3, Informative)

          by jalefkowit ( 101585 )

          I agree, Lookout makes Outlook practically tolerable. In fact, Microsoft thought so much of the Lookout team that they bought the company [lookoutsoft.com] and turned what used to be a for-pay product into a free download [microsoft.com].

          Additionally, many of the Lookout team are supposed to have worked on the new MSN Toolbar for Outlook [msn.com], which is supposedly quite good (though I have not had a chance to try it myself yet).

        • I used to use Lookout and it was OK, but much slower (probably because it uses .NET Framework) than Google Desktop (GDS). The main benefit of Lookout is that it makes it easy to search for specific attachment types etc.

          Our IT dept claimed Lookout was hitting the Exchange server very hard, which seems unlikely given its indexes are on the client PC, but who knows...
    • I also installed it right after it came out, but it wasn't useful to me, so I uninstalled it a couple of days later. It didn't search Thunderbird.
    • I find X1, the underlying search engine very useful. Its Outlook search is much faster than the native one. If you have a large collection of PDF files (e.g. technical references) its very simple to find all papers that refer to a particular paper, or that use a phrase, etc. Basically its as fast as I can type. Similarly for searching code files (you can add file types and search just those.) Great for finding that (commented) code fragment that you wrote last year!
    • 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
    • I think it would find most use if it was given an easy API; obviously most of the time you say 'oh I want to start working on ______', and you know where it is; the on the fly stuff--inserting images, tracking down headers, reading docs, checking some email for a spec: little files needed for something larger, which could have littered your hard drive for years in who knows what locations--THAT is where I believe this would find greatest use, and hence wants to be closely integrated into programs (enhanced
    • I was doing an interview with a friend of mine for a school grade (i was being the interviewee) via AOL instant messanger and her computer crashed (a mac. I giggled) and she lost the session. had google desktop not archived it then the whole thing would have been lost up to that point and we would have had to start over.

      Mostly what I use the google desktop search for is going through instant messanger convos to find a particular link, or website, or what have you. I also use DeadAIM, which can log chats,

  • Forgot something? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mscnln ( 785138 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @09:06PM (#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??
    • 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??

      They probably bought someone else's stock library.

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

    by kosmosik ( 654958 ) <kos@ko[ ]sik.net ['smo' in gap]> on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @09:07PM (#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
  • .. I want a Yahoo Blogger or a Yahoo Orkut! Things to integrate with my Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo groups.
  • 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 @09:10PM (#11329399) Journal
    Google - "w00t"
    MS - "w00t"
    Yahoo - "w00t"
    Google - "Ah, fuck it!"

  • Lacking (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Docrates ( 148350 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @09:11PM (#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.
  • Great, a hundred DOS formats that haven't been used since DOS 1.1, but no Rar format.

    Did they outsource this to a company who makes conversion programs or do it inhouse? It's the worst mix of random formats I've ever seen.
  • 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?!?!? :-)
  • Yeah has simply licensed this software from Idealab, which is the company that makes X1. People that are familiar with X1 know it was the successor to Lotus Magellan. It'll be an okay desktop search engine, but Idealabs already admits that it doesn't have the power to be in the business market, so it will continue to develop its X1 product for its potential business customers.

  • Clean interface (Score:2, Interesting)

    by g_braad ( 105535 )
    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.
  • Yahoo has already fallen out of favor. With their BLOATED website and TONS of multimedia ads (big bandwidth for even broadband) I have not used thier search in at least 5 years.
    • Too bad, since they have a REALLY good search engine on http://mysearch.yahoo.com/ . It is still a beta, but for quite some time have also have a slim down http://search.yahoo.com/ which also works with the googlepreview extensions for firefox. and no, they don't use the google databases anymore, since Yahoo! also owns Overture and AllTheWeb.
  • 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?
  • Why is it that neither the Google or Yahoo! desktop search programs index Firefox pages? I mean, Google screwed up the first time by not putting it in, and then Yahoo! still doesn't include it, yet includes all these archaic formats that hardly anyone ever uses anymore. And if people did use them, they wouldn't exactly be the ones you'd see installing this tool in the first place.
  • Or is everyone jumping on the "Beta" bandwagon?
  • ...they don't even let you choose an installation drive, so I can't use it because my C drive hasn't got 1.5 Gb spare. How absolutely pathetic is that?
  • All I want to be able to do is search all the source code files on my machine. You currently can't do that with any of the desktop search apps out there other than windows built in search (which takes decades).
    • It treats source code as text files it seems. I know I get results in .h, .c, .cpp, .java, files.

      It's also nice because it keeps a sort of version history with it's cache. Be nice if it could also do a diff between cached versions.
  • This [apple.com] is what a REAL desktop search looks like.
  • I dabbled a little with swish, got it to index pdfs, but didn't pursue it after a while (didn't get to the search interface part beyond the command line). I hate to admit my laziness, but I wonder whether there is a point-n-click thingy that can let me select a few directories and say "index these", and later click and say "get me results from the index" (even multiple indexes).

    Mostly, I have collections of pdf documents, and they are in a set of folders (some across the network).

    I tried Google desktop, a
  • Didn't we establish that copernic desktop search was the best some time ago? I gave google desktop a try but it wouldn't play nice with Internet Download Manager and Netlimiter (both excellent applications) so it had to go.

    I'm very pleased with Copernic by the way. Great interface, fast indexing and only 2.8 Mb on memory. Google desktop search was several times that.

  • You seem to have a lot of ancient formats, but you have to see the future too.

    In other words, there is no desktop search engine that has support for indexing microsoft reader (*.lit) files, or Aportis doc (*.prc, *.pdb) files and all the ebook formats out there.

    That's more important than ancient database file formats.
  • because it doesn't have Ogg support!!!!!!!
    • You know, as funny as you're being, you're right. I searched this page right before posting -- not a single entry for "meta" ... I don't know about everybody else, but searching text is the -last- thing I do. I don't care about text. I care about images and sound; I want to be able to hunt down all music that includes a violin and singing, but exclude all music involving an electric guitar. And yeah, there's porn too. These tools don't do any work for you beyond "fast" text searching; they won't tag files a
  • GDS is not bad overall, but it doesn't have any way of picking up file renaming, emails moved to another folder, and so on. The result is the frustration of 'finding' a useful document and not being able to open it after all, because it has moved or been renamed.

    GDS does hook into new file events, and often manages to index a new file within a minute of its being created, so I don't see why this shouldn't be possible. I suggested all this to the Google team but they probably have other priorities.

    Copern
  • According to the "About," they're using Outside In by Stellent [stellent.com] to parse file formats. This lib has been around for a long, long time, which is why you can search MacWrite files.

    The "About" also refers to X1 [x1.com], which is another desktop search solution.
  • Yahoo's desktop search looks like a re-branded version of the X1 Desktop Search tool, which is a $75 product. I'm still feeling it out, but it seems to beat the snot out of Google Desktop Search and Copernic. That's saying a lot, especially in the case of the latter.

    If you're using a desktop search product, this one is worth checking out.

    What I can't figure out is why all these portal sites are so hot to put desktop search tools in our hands for free. I don't object as I find them tremendously useful,

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