Wharton Tech Blog

I finally uninstalled Lookout, a search add-in for my Outlook. The add-in became unwieldy and burdensome on my laptop. First it was every 60, then 90, then 100 and even at 120 minute intervals for quick re-indexing, it took basically a 1-2 minutes of 100% cpu utilization. There is naturally inverse relationship between the intervals and the time to reindex: the longer the wait, the longer it’ll take to reindex given a growing rate of email and document generation.

This wasn’t the entire reason but definitely the biggest reason. Ever since I’ve had Google Desktop Search, I found Lookout’s results out-of-date, often irrelevant, and hard to search. Yes, the search results had to be searched! On the occasions that I did use GDS, the results were always highly relevant, timely and I didn’t need to search them, I found what I needed usually in the first few items. Lookout also included My Documents folder, but the file and document results were just inadequate or related usually to the filenames rather than content. Lookout is clearly geared for searching within Outlook, but even there it didn’t pass muster compared to GDS especially in the timeliness of results.

Timely, is another huge benefit that Lookout didn’t have. Because GDS shows results on your desktop even when you search the Internet through Google, I was always surprised at how quickly new emails or documents were indexed. The indexing worked as claimed, unintrusive and effective. And this is the beauty of GDS compared to other services: for heavy users, you pay an initial indexing price, but you’re never bothered by growth of your information creation or exchange. My only pet peeve: GDS doesn’t index contacts or Calendar items from outlook, but compared to Lookout this is small price to pay.

Perhaps the biggest beenfit of Lookout was the Outlook toolbar. But that meant opening Outlook to search even documents: not ideal. In the end, GDS’ use of IE/Firefox is good enough. It even indexes my mp3, guitar tabs and video files. Good enough is here to stay.

Or is it? Just today, Yahoo is announcing a new desktop search software based on X1’s desktop search technology. Jeff Weiner, SVP of Search & Marketplace, Wharton alum, and happy to report, a keynote speaker for the 2005 Wharton Technology Conference that I’m organizing with fellow Whartonites, was quoted as saying: "Yahoo desktop search will provide a seamless intuitive way [for users] to search all of their digital content, wherever it resides"

Article on Infoworld, Wall Street Journal (registration may be required) That’s not the end of it, clearly, beacause there are more and more things that need indexing on my 2 PCs as we speak.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 10th, 2004 at 8:21 am and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.