Yahoo! and MSN: dual kick in Google’s Desktop Search groin
So long, GDS (google desktop search). It was short but it’s now over. I’ve been trying out Yahoo’s desktop search beta over the past few days. It’s based on X1’s software, which I have never tried before, and it simply leaves GDS in the dust. It indexes more files formats than you care to remember. It has a relatively fast and reasonably sized indexer. It has advanced search built in and seems to work seamlessly just like MSN or GDS does. I’ve also had MSN Desktop Search installed over the past month, and I’m a happy camper with this one as well. If you like Yahoo!’s Desktop Search, be sure to stop by our Wharton Technology Conference and give Jeff Weiner a big applause. He’s one of our keynotes.
Both apps are quite good and simply leave Google’s unworthy piece of software in the dust. I like Yahoo! because it has so much options to offer and pops up like a real app, very quickly, search shows up instantly, you can quickly re-sort and narrow things down based on a few attributes (from/to, date, subject, format, etc) and you have a preview pane on the right. So, even media files, emails and docs appear on the right to ensure you have the relevant result. Wow!
Delays by Yahoo! and MSN in both cases were worth it. Switching costs: about 1 hour or who cares! Yes, that’s how easy it is to dethrone google, at least on the desktop. I’m still testing and I think both have a preference issues among users, but my main usage for now is MSN, because of the toolbar and Yahoo! on my home desktop because of the search results and speed. Competition is just plain good. I encourage everyone to try both of these and find some preferences.
Here are a few pro/con that I found. GDS has the most stealthy process with real-time indexing and under 10MB RAM usage. MSN has also real-time indexing but its memory baloons heading to the 70-90MB range. This isn’t huge because some of it gets cached on the drive, but it’s an indication of the architecture. Yahoo is somewhere in the middle. It uses about 20-40MB and works almost real-time. Some items are indexed real-time and some you have to specify a time interval. Generally, I hate intervals, but so far so good. Both MSN and Yahoo! vastly outindex GDS in file format. MSN is built around the iFilter method and the more iFilter add-ons you have installed, more files will get indexed. This means, new apps just need to install an iFilter for their files and MSN will get you covered. I’ll make another post on this later.
March 23rd, 2005 at 4:04 pm
You might want to try Copernic Desktop search as well (http://www.copernic.com/index.html). I used to use X1 (thought I haven’t tried Yahoo’s version), and found it quite resource intensive. Copernic’s feature set is essentially identical, but it’s much lighter. They’ve teamed with with AOL to offer desktop search to AOL users, but I’m not sure what the timeframe for that release is.