Yahoo! Desktop Search Beta is out
The drama continues with Yahoo! rolling out their own version based on X1 technology in the newly created and already flooded Desktop Search market. Google has made everyone and I repeat everyone to standup and take notice. So much so that even unknown brands in the market like Blinkx are giving tech giants like Microsoft and Ask Jeeves a run for their money.
Yahoo! promised sometime back that they would be out with their version early next year and they have kept that promise. The Yahoo! Desktop Search is now publicly available in beta download. It has again stayed away from the controversial browser history searching and only does emails and desktop files. Unfortunately as all other products in the market, Yahoo! Desktop Search also does only Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express for mails and contacts.
Yahoo! promises to integrate Yahoo! Mail searching in the near future but users have to live with what they have offered for now. The download size is huge at around 7.5 Megs and the application uses its own interface for searching which tries to emulate Microsoft Outlook interface with left column for main buttons and a preview window. Only Google and Microsoft seems to have gone with the web browser version of desktop searching.
The application claims to support searching around 200 desktop file formats with live previews for almost each one of them. It also claims to play videos and animations in the preview pane. Excel files appear as spreadsheets and Email searching offer Outlook buttons to process the emails. Quite innovative and interesting in the first look. TechWhack would be back with a comprehensive review in the coming days.
The desktop search market is getting very crowded these days with every major vendor throwing their hat into the ring. I work at a small company focused on organizing desktop content and we are wondering when folks will start to also look beyond basic search and really help people organize the glut of information overload on their desktop so that they can avoid the problems they will soon get with search …. too many results to filter through. Our releases are a lot more quiet than the big guys but people might find the product of interest given that it is breaking ground to help people find their documents in a different way.