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

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

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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: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.

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.