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Yahoo Releases Desktop Search Tool Beta
Rolan writes "Yahoo! has released to BETA their Desktop Search Tool. It has a much longer list of file types that it will search, including compressed files, than the Google Desktop Search Tool. Though, the usefulness of a good number of those file types would come into question for most people."
MSN, Yahoo and Google have the desktop search tools. Now everybody will follow suit. That's all fair and good, but isn't that why your OS has a "search" tool? I do not see the usefulness of a tool and will open you up to more problems than you need....
Some call me Howie Feltersnatch
I find this desktop search too be a lot of hype and it's a tool I'm not all that interested in - the cost is too high. Open up the security of your machine to some external source... Not good IMO... Your security is as strong as its weakest link (granted in my case it's Winodws)...
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They spend their time deciphering file formats that haven't been used for 10 years, but they don't include AbiWord or OpenOffice whose file format is open??
I can't understand why it does not index OOo/SO documents? Those formats are *open* and well documented. Or FireFox/Mozilla bookmarks/mail/history - it is also open and documented - I bet the community is also willing to help when they (Yahoo developers) have some issues with that. Also probably it is more common than some obscure DOS editors...
In my office we use only OOo (but on Windows) FireFox and Thunderbird - we have crafted some rather nice services including central databases with LDAP export to email clients, custom web apps running exclusively with FireFox (XUL-based), OpenOffice.org is connected to databases also, all server infrastructure is running Linux (Fedora) and lowlevel stuff (DNS, routing, FW etc.) is working on OpenBSD...
So - having desktop search tool that will allow to index that (OOo/Mozilla) will be usefull to us. Todays offering simply suck as they go indexing only some expensive and crappy formats that some expensive and ureliable software produces...
What I need is for these tools to look into email headers, so that if I'm looking for information regarding "contract negotiations with Xerox" it will look into the "to:" line in the message header (@xerox.com) even if the message doesn't mention the company's name. The fact that this feature's not there yet has been the source of at least 50% of all failures by google desktop to find what I'm looking for. Yahoo doesn't seem to fix this either.
And before all those "what do you need this when you have the windows search tool" posts start popping up... two words: indexing and content (as in the content of files, not just the filename.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Yep.
I use Outlook and I can search for and locate Outlook emails in about 2 seconds. When I use Outlook search, I have to wait until it searches every single email and them presents them to me and here is the kicker, I can't do anything else while Outlook is searching otherwise the search stops. I have a couple of 1000 emails (I tend to keep deleted email for a long time and I rarely clean out my in box).
Another use is that I have alot of files for work in My Documents that I refer back to often as far as a year or so. No amount of organizing is going to save me time locating stuff.
The point is, computers are good at indexing and searching, I am not, so let the computer do the work.
I'm not sure I understand what yahoo or google have to gain from this product. It appears to me this is more a proof of concept than a tool. Could this be the groundwork for some future invasion of privacy?
The problem with Outlook search is that it can be incredibly slow if you have a bit mailbox. The search options are also limited.
Going with Google search is a lot faster in this case. It's also convenient to see all possible results in one search location.
Of course, there are security issues involved, but that's another story.
I have years of emails, and it takes a long time to do searchers in Outlook. Ironically, GDS is way faster and much better than outlook to search for email, I no longer use Outlook search which is slow and as mentioned by another poster stops me from other work I might be doing with that application.
As it turns out, searching is a common OS like function that is justified to be outside of the individual apps. It's nice that you seem to have a good organization system for all your stuff, but I have so many files that a hierarchy is not going to help me find stuff in 1-2 seconds.
- sigs are for wimps.