The Hindu : National : They want to search your desktop!

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Dec 20, 2004

National

National

They want to search your desktop!

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, DEC. 19. Is this the most compelling service for personal computer users in 2004? Seems so, going by the number of players rushing to woo the world's 700 million `connected' PC owners with free tools to search the cat's cradle of files, pictures and emails on their own desktops.

In the late August, a small Boston-based company, Copernic, kicked off the race with a neat 2.3 Megabyte download that scoured all types of files on a Windows-based PC and allowed users to move smoothly to search the Web itself, if required. It was touted as not just easy, but brain-dead easy, something that the dummies of the world appreciated and downloaded 30 million copies within weeks. (www.copernic.com)

This prompted the mother of all web search engines, Google to come up with its own offering in beta form by mid October. It was a much smaller download of about 400 kilobytes (http://desktop.google.com/).

Last week, saw two new offerings: Microsoft's MSN site unveiled its own "Toolbar Suite" in beta or test form. This was the largest download till then 4.7 MB but had the advantage of simultaneous buttons in three places — the desktop tool bar, the Internet Explorer browser and the Outlook emailer. (http://beta.toolbar.msn.com/).

Another free offering came from the creators of the Web's first search tool that understands plain English: "Ask Jeeves", named after the perfect man servant of the PG Wodehouse novels. The Ask Jeeves Desktop Search is the most economical of the current crop at just 128 KB and downloads in less than a minute on most connections. It boasts the same easy style of putting your queries, that distinguished its web-based version. (http://download.ask.com/desktop/)

It is difficult to say which is better or worse of the four desktop searchers — and since they are all in beta stage, the makers can be depended on to tighten the working once they have sized up the competition.

And there is another offering promised in January — from the most popular Internet portal, Yahoo. It has tied up with a desktop search specialist, X1 Technologies, and says its offering will be zippier than the others.

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