Yahoo! Releases Desktop Search Tool

Hobadee writes "According to The Register, Yahoo! has released a desktop search program to compete with Google's. Apparently Yahoo's version is native to Windows, and thus faster than Google's, but less portable. Other question - what does this mean for things like the Google Search Appliance? Personally, I still like 'find / > index' in a cron script, then just grep 'index'...."

Comments

you know ...

[wobblie]

locate (1) has been around for quite some time now ...

not true

[mr_tommy]

To be clear, Yahoo haven't actually released anything yet; they've licensed the tech from another company (pretty poor show) and will be slapping some branding on it with a launch planned for 2005.

'find / index' isn't the same thing.

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Personally, I still like 'find / > index' in a cron script, then just grep 'index'...."

Apples and oranges.

Google Desktop Search (and presumably Yahoo DS) also searches inside the actual files. If I search for "VPN", I see a list of all files (and Outlook messages) which contain the string "VPN".

'find / |grep' doesn't do any of that.... even "find / -exec grep foo {} \;" is much slower then an indexed database engine.

I haven't installed it (Not sure I trust it), but a coworker was showing it to me yesterday. Pretty handy...

X1 Software and Website

[David Hume]

X1 Website

15 Day Trial Version

Yes!

[Vicsun]

This is great news. I love gMail and consequently all other things google, but Google Desktop Search has been a disaster. I originally posted this in google groups, but I feel I need to post it here as well.

I won't even start complaining about google only supporting programs I don't use (AIM? IE? Outlook?), as it's still in beta and I represent a minority group anyway.
However I have several other problems...
1. When a a folder has the same name as my search term, google search will display *all* files within that folder. For example if I search for 'doom 3' it won't just list the files called 'doom 3' it will list *all* the files in the doom 3 folder. It would be much more useful if it would only display the folder once as a separate search result, and then only display files called 'doom 3'

2. Inability to only search for filenames *only* - sometimes, or actually most of the time, I want to find a specific file. I know I have created important.doc but when I search for 'important' I get a plethora of results featuring different documents / text files which have the word 'important' within them. Windows' search has done this nicely by giving me the ability to search for a 'all or a part of the filename' and for 'a word or a phrase within the file'. I also have the option to 'look in' which brings me to my next point

3. Inability to search within a folder - because sometimes it is extremely useful to look for *.mp3 in my very disorganized 'thereShouldBeNoMusicHere' folder. Or to look for anything at all in a drive different than C...

4. Wildcard searches - oftentimes I just can't remember how I've saved the file. Was my presentation called group4project.ppt or group4.ppt or G4.ppt? A simple search of *4*.ppt should find the file, where * is a wildcard. Currently I can't do that.

5. Un-indexing of files - I just moved 500 files from my desktop to my documents. GDS has re-indexed them in My Documents. When I search for file.txt I get two results only one of which is valid. Of course, I can manually remove the invalid result from the index, but I really don't want to do it 500 times. Even if I can somehow magically get all the duplicate files on the same search, I can only remove them 10 at a time.

Until google resolves those issues (and I certainly hope they do), the search integrated into Windows is more useful. I hope yahoo have made a better job than google on this one, I'm off to try it :)

Re:Yes!

[damiam]

I'm not gonna claim that GDS is perfect, but you're not using it for its intended purpose. If you search for "important project" you should get all documents related to said project, including those in a folder with that name. As for your complaints 2,3, and 4, all of those can be done easily with standard Windows search tools. If what you want to search a filesystem for a filename, GDS isn't for you. GDS is designed to search the content of documents and return those relevent to your query.

grep/locate/etc is fine but...

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't exactly the same. In a desktop environment, there's times where you need a document, music file, movie file, etc. You might not know the filename, only some keywords in the file. With something like Google Desktop, you can preview the contents of the file right there and click something to immediately open the application that supports that filetype. Also, Google is continually watching what files you are opening, moving, deleting, etc. This means that the database is updated instantaneously.

Having a cron job is nice, but it just doesn't cut it when you are interested in finding things you did or installed 2 hours ago. Personally, I would be fine having no home directory structure. Any desktop stuff like docs, music, etc. could be automatically sorted for all I care. I just want to be able to have a little search bar somewhere on my DE that I type in a word and POOF it's there. Of course, this I-don't-care-where-it-is attitude doesn't work for compiling or generic console work. It's wonderful for a DE, though.

Copernic

[Khuffie]

Copernic already does everything this does, for free. It also searches web history, and supports Firefox.

Re:Filename search for Windows?

[TheRaven64]

I don't know about XP, but in Windows 2000 the indexing service doesn't integrate with the standard find command in explorer, you have to run it from MMC. You may also have to disable the service (I can't remember it's name) which restarts services it thinks are using too much memory. I had a problem with 2K where the indexing service would start running (consuming a lot of CPU), get to about 50MB of memory usage and then be restarted by this service (at which point it would start indexing again). Failing that, I believe that locate works well in cygwin.

Re:More spyware vs.spyware

[aardvarko]

Your ignorance betrays you. Google Desktop Search doesn't rely on a remote server to provide Desktop results; it installs an ipfilter that intercepts queries to google.com/search and injects Desktop results into it. Direct searches against the Desktop engine are provided by HTTP connections to localhost.

Clearly, the ipfilter solution is a bit of a hack, and raises other concerns - but did you really think that Google has both the ability and the desire to transfer store gigabytes of information from your workstation?

Now that you're done with that tinfoil hat - mind if I keep it? I need *something* to wrap this hot dog in. Damn ketchup's going everywhere.

Re:Here's an idea for whoever wants to implement i

[revscat]

Since nowadays everyone and their dog are releasing desktop search engines, here's the thing that can give a commercial/technological advantage - implement plugin mechanism for searching other file types.

Next version of OS X, probably coming Q1 2005. Metadata will be integrated into the file system, and authors will be able to describe their own metadata to the OS.

Yay.

Re:Filename search for Windows?

[jayloden]

Agent Ransack is a free program that spanks the XP search tool, and has the functionality you want. I don't use windows anymore, but when I did, this is what I used. It also has the ability to integrate into the shell a little so it's conveniently accessible, e.g. from the "Search" start menu item.

I think that may be what you desire for a Windows search tool.

-Jay

*NIX GDS Clone: Baagle

[Anonymous Coward]

http://floatingsheep.com/baagle.html

Baagle Desktop Search is a work-alike for Google Desktop Search. It is a self-contained integration of various third-party components (Swish-E, Perl, a number of document converters) to provide an integrated web-based desktop search. No web-server is required.

learn your UNIX tools (locate)

[jeif1k]

Personally, I still like 'find / > index' in a cron script, then just grep 'index'...."

Try "man locate" and "man updatedb"; that's been around forever. It probably already gets updated nightly on your computer (that's why your disk starts making all that noise early in the morning).

If you want to search for content, you can combine it with grep and xargs:

$ locate .tex | xargs fgrep something
...
$ locate .tex | xargs agrep foobar
...
$ locate foo | grep -v bar | xargs grep something
...
$

More complicated pipes involve "file", "perl", "awk", etc.

Re:Filename search for Windows?

[spongman]

damn, it's so simple on windows it's funny so much fuss is being made about this now:

1. start the indexing service, wait for it to index your drives.
2. search (Win-F), and prefix your search string with "!"

Re:Well

[new-black-hand]

I still like 'find / > index' in a cron script, then just grep 'index'...."

That does not search the contents of files. Nor does locate.