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

always 1 behind yahoo

[djxploit]

cant seem to get ahead can u... :(

Searching file content!

[PornMaster]

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

Which helps you find the e-mail from Aunt Mary where she told you the location of her will... how?

grepping a file list does nothing for searching the contents of your files... which both of these products do.

Re:Searching file content!

[Tim Browse]

If you know it was an email, then why not use your email client for the search? Email clients are tuned for that kind of thing

Hahahaha!

Thanks - that was a good one :)

What is wrong with the current tools?

[Space_Soldier]

I search for a file every few months since my files are categorized, and I easily find them by browsing. What exactly is wrong with the current desktop search tools like the one found in Windows Explorer that makes these companies create alternatives?

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[bushidocoder]

The search tools of old simply return all files that contain a certain substring. You can sort them by name or date created, but that's about it. Desktop searching, on the other hand, has the oppurtunity to make guesses as to a document's relevance based on context, the very power that has made Google as useful as it is.

I've got a couple hundred technical ebooks on my box at work - With GDS if I search for "sql server replication performance", the ones that show up first are the ones that have entire chapters written about the subject. It'll still turn up that email where I bitched to a coworker about sql server replication performance sucking because the client had them connected through 6 vpns, but in all likelyhood, that's not the document I'm looking for.

On the same note, if my girlfriend searches her box for a specific legal document form, the empty templates always come up first, which is exactly what she's looking for 95% of the time. Last year, if she was looking for the IDS template for the French patent office, she'd have to wade through the 500 or so that were sitting on her work machine until she found it.

When Microsoft was talking about desktop search, they said that within 4 years, searching for a person's name on your computer will return photographs of them that you took on a vacation last year via face recognition. I highly doubt they'll beat Google to figuring out how to do that one right (and I doubt that anyone's figuring it out in 4 years), but who cares who invents it - ultimately that's something that has value to my grandma. What we're seeing now is the first generation of desktop search tools - gen1 might not be that much better than a find/grep, but the foundation of the technology allows it to go in directions that simple text searching just can't.

Re:not true

[Staplerh]

If I ever got mod-points, I'd mod this one up. Wow, I RTFA and didn't pick up on that, and apparently the article poster didn't either.

Although to give the poster some credit, that website 'The Register' is not the best written of websites.

for all the slocate guys

[theguywhosaid]

"find / | grep junk" and "updatedb; locate junk" both have one problem in common. they do not check the content of the file. try "grep junk `find /`". and really people, who wants to wait for that to finish?

find/grep/index wtf?

[RLiegh]

See? This is a large part of why linux isn't mainstream yet. You have far too many luddites who have far too much influence and want to pretend it's still 1979.

and stuff.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[miu]

Well the problem is an attitude that shuts out the possibility of there being a problem for which locatedb or any other simple solution is not good enough or easy enough. The strength of UNIX is often that it encourages you to actually think about the problem and break it into easy to solve pieces as well as giving you the simple tools (and primitives to build new tools easily) to do pretty much anything with the your data.

So sure there is a problem with linux fanboys dismissing anything outside their worldview, but the tools and attitudes of UNIX are hardly ludism - they are still valuable and are still responsible for a lot of the real work that gets done in the computing world.

Native to Windows?

[oniony]

Yahoo's is native to Windows and Google's isn't? Eh? Eh? Google's is native too, it runs as a Windows process, indexing files and running searches.

If they mean the user interface is a Windows app rather than a web client then, yes, but who cares? That's not that bit that's doing the work, that's just rendering some results. It may mean Yahoo will be able to take advantage of some more advanced controls, such as listviews, but Google has already proven with Gmail that it is able to kick out a pretty convining web application so I wouldn't cite that as an advantage.

Do you yahoo?

[cbr2702]

Do you remember the old adds of "Do you Yahoo"? Yahoo put a lot of effort into branding, but didn't do nearly as well because their search just wasn't as good.

Re:you know ...

[damiam]

I think the parent was responding to the summary's comment about find and grep, not the Yahoo tool.

Personally Leet

[buddha42]

Y'ever notice how whenever a person ends a newsgroup/forum/bullettinboard post with "Personally I..." it is always some kind of "look how amazingly fucking leet I am for using this hardcore way of doing things" type bullshit?

Personally I think its retarded.