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

Well

[Lord Kano]

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

I'm still digging slocate.

LK

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.

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.

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.

Re:not true

[br0ck]

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

always 1 behind yahoo

[djxploit]

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

i wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

i wonder what wonderful 'features' it has that run in the background.

Hmm..

[Staplerh]

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).

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!

[pseudochaotic]

Well, the obvious solution is the following:

cat `find /` > index

And then grepping from index.

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?

[kfg]

The fact that most people are disorginized slobs who don't put their toys away, I guess.

On another forum I recently ran across a guy who was wondering what to do when you "run out of space" on your start menu.

I suggested that he keep his socks, WD40, silverware and ratchet set in different drawers.

KFG

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.

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 / 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

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.

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.

Re:Yes!

[Jahz]

Vicsun, you make all good points, but why are you ranting here?

Im not huge fan of GDS, but your complaining about a free Beta product. Go drop Google and email and maybe some of that stuff will get fixed.

Also try to remember Google's target audience for GDS is not the /. ers. Sure, it *could* be with a few major changes, but that's for Google to decide. If they wanted nerds, they would have released a linux version, or at least OSX.

I tried GDS out on my Winxp pc a few weeks ago and thought it was cool, but overall I was unimpressed. In my case, I know the exact -- or close to it -- location of all my important files, my thousands of MP3's and hundreds of movies (all ordered heirarchally). GDS was useful, but only on rare occasion. I didnt think it deserves the CPU cycles or precious tray space.

With that being said, I have installed it on my parents computers and recommend it to less technologically inclined people. Its perfect for them. After all, thats all they need.

As for Me? Ill stick with my familiar old friends, find/locate and grep.

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.

Re:you know ...

[spellraiser]

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

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.

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.

Filename search for Windows?

[eMartin]

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?

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: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

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 "!"

Here's an idea for whoever wants to implement it

[melted]

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.

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.

Copernic

[Khuffie]

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

Re:Copernic

[gadwale]

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.

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.

A great open source project...

[Goonie]

It wouldn't be hard to build a Linux tool to do this. There are indexing algorithms in the literature - heck, one of my undergraduate lecturers wrote the book on this stuff. You'd have a niced daemon or a cronjob that goes looking for new files (in specified directories - one great thing about Linux systems is the file system tends to be a lot more organised than Windows, where stuff gets put everywhere). You'd have a plugin system to extract plain text from the various file formats. You could then have multiple frontends - console, GNOME, KDE, and so on - in the GNOME case you'd probably integrate it with nautilus.

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 :)

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.

Stupid news poster

[northcat]

Apparently Yahoo's version is native to Windows, and thus faster than Google's, but less portable.

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 /. 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.)

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.