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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'...."
i wonder what wonderful 'features' it has that run in the background.
It doesn't, as yet, index your browser history, but as Google has discovered with GDS, this can be a double-edged sword.
Now they can market it as the Desktop Search Tool of the privacy-concious, and call a lack of a feature a good safe feature. I know this horse has been flogged to death on the other threads concerning Google Desktop Search, but puhleese.
It is blindingly fast at both indexing and retrieval - which is near instant - and has the huge advantage over Google Desktop Search of being a native Windows client.
Don't know what to say - if it does serve 97 percent of the computer market more effectively, then perhaps they will dominate the system. It'll be interesting to see if this turns into a battle of paradigms: programs native to an OS (i.e. Yahoo!) or browser based (Google).
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
On Windows? For non-geeks?
Don't think so, somehow. It's easy enough to point out Unix command-line tools that do the job of any application such as this one, but what exactly is the point?
Will geeks use this Yahoo! tool? No
Does Yahoo! care? No
Just because a tool is not useful for us geeks, it doesn't mean it's useless, period.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
I just want a fast filename search for Windows.
I don't care about content, since most of the files I work with don't have searchable content in the first place, and I give them useful filenames anyway. I just forget where they're saved sometimes, or want a quicker way to get to them.
Even with indexing turned on (does that help with filename searches?), Windows takes 2 or 3 minutes to search all my drives by filename only.
I know there's Ava Find, which is very fast and does what I want, but the UI sucks, and AppRocket, which is also fast but isn't really a search tool as much as a launcher.
So, are there any others that work like the Windows Explorer search, but faster?
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. I'd kill to be able to search my Thunderbird mail archives, yet neither Copernic, nor Google will do this, because they only understand MS email clients. Same applies to my digital camera files. I always make sure I attach IPTC metadata to them to desicribe roughly where and when the picture was taken, and what's on the picture. Current desktop search engines simply ignore this.
I'm on the X1 beta test team and the latest builds are amazing. I can search through 600,000 items as fast as I type. I have it indexing all email, my local drives, and all directories on content and web servers that I care about. Doing phone support or debugging and being able to quickly recall every email, document or piece of code pertaining to an issue has been an awesome productivity boost. /two cents
One thing you'd have to think carefully about is privacy and security; how do you stop a user finding stuff out about files they're not entitled to read?
I'd start it myself except that I have a thesis to do :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Apparently Yahoo's version is native to Windows, and thus faster than Google's, but less portable.
/. summary says that yahoo is faster because its a native application, but the article says that yahoo is faster and its a native application offering more benifits, not because. Do the deduction yoursel. (BTW, I refuse to believe that someone can be stupid enough to do this out of mistake.)
No. The article doesn't say that. Read it again. The news poster twisted the words to make google look good. For once why can't people just agree that someone has done something better than google?
For the morons among us who don't understand what I am saying: the
Advantages of Copernic:
1. Google desktop search is strictly not for commercial use (For commercial use, you need to buy a Google appliance) (I wrote to them to find out if this prohibits any use in a commercial setting such as on an employer's computer and they did not reply)
2. Google desktop search does not index PDF files
3. Google desktop search does not do partial word matches (huge disadvantage when you have filenames which are just concatenated words with no spaces)
4. n GDS, you get to exclude folder that you do not want to index, in Copernic, you get to include folders that you want to index. I prefer the "index only when asked to do so explicitly" option.
5. GDS will not index mapped network drives except for files that you actually open and use after installing GDS
6. Unlike GDS, Copernic will index outlook email attachments also
7. Copernic gives a real time preview of the matched area as you highlight each search result line
I am sure GDS will be a great tool someday. For now, Copernic offers better options. And now that GDS is here, Copernic is free! Competition is always good for the end user!
-Adi.