Google has finally released a desktop search tool called Google Desktop (beta). I think it's interesting that this release was touted in the New York Times today and that a similar move by Microsoft was not significantly advertised (yet).
Most interesting, the NYT article is factually incorrect - they state "the program gives Google an important head start on Microsoft Corp., which is working on a similar file-searching tool that it recently said would not be ready for the next version of its Windows operating system promised for 2006."
However, it's not true (which could signal Microsoft's ability to 'catch up' and pass competitors). Earlier this year Microsoft bought a start-up firm that had developed a search tool for Outlook email call Lookout. The tool vastly improves the search results, and I've been using it for the last few weeks and find it works very well. As an option, the tool can also index files on the hard drive, which was mentioned in an Microsoft press release earlier this year while announcing the acquisition.
In reality the tool had the ability to index files since it was developed and owned by Microsoft since July 2004. However, the Google tool is integrated with the online search format and appears as a webpage, whereas the Lookout tool is integrated with Outlook. It appears Microsoft will develop and deploy a local hard drive tool only when it is more closely integrated with the desktop OS.
Finally, two things I find interesting about these moves...
1. Hard drive indexing and search has been around for a long time; I saw a really neat search product back in 1999-2000 that was amazing. It's surprising that it's taken this long to actually see releases by the major search players.
2. MS's move to acquire and deploy Lookout as a part of MSN seems to imply that the search expertise they desire is to move into the online search community vs Google's move from the online search down to the desktop.
Posted by Jeremy Showalter at October 14, 2004 02:47 PMCopernic (http://www.copernic.com/) is a good alternative. It does email, history, local files, etc.
Posted by: Joel at October 14, 2004 03:27 PMThanks. Nice to see you're posting again. I'll try to keep a better eye on it now. And I can plug your site one of these days... :)
Posted by: Jeremy at October 14, 2004 03:45 PMWhen Terry Semel, the Yahoo! CEO, came and spoke here a few weeks ago he seemed to hint that MS has been asleep at the wheel as far as important acquisitions go. He made it sound like they purchased Overture right out from under Microsoft's nose, and were constantly fearful that they would be outbid.
Posted by: Mark at October 14, 2004 04:58 PMInteresting point. At a recent MS presentation here, they seemed to be very focused on MSN, but it did appear that it was something they were going to be building (in terms of search) from the inside or smaller acquisitions - not as a huge buy like Overture.
Posted by: Jeremy at October 14, 2004 05:10 PM
Lookout is based on the Lucene Indexing library from the Apache Group ( http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/index.html ) and is therefore boung by the Apache 2.0 License: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
While it is a *highly* flexible and able library, in order for Microsoft to distribute it, they have to provide the source and must include it as a seperate logical/physical module from Outlook.
Besides, docsearcher (from Sourceforge) is a much better tool, can handle email, word, excel, pdf, html, txt, and presents its reseults as a webpage.
Cool. Right now I'm using Google's tool, and I'm not sure if I like it displaying results on the same webpage or not (I think that's an optional setting).
Posted by: Jeremy at October 18, 2004 08:42 AM