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

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 :)

Copernic

[Khuffie]

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