Fulfilling a New Year's promise, Yahoo Inc. on Tuesday released a beta test of its desktop search application to compete with similar offerings from its top search competitors.
Yahoo Desktop Search, which available as a free download [
http://desktop.yahoo.com/ ], is built on technology licensed from X1 Technologies Inc., a desktop-search startup. The beta will serve as the basis for a series of product updates in the next few months, said Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo's director of media and desktop search.
The beta application scours users' hard drives to index about 250 files types, including Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, executables and image and audio files. It also searches e-mails, the full text of attachments and contacts, but it only supports messages and contacts stored in Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express.
The Yahoo client features the ability to preview e-mails and files in a right-side panel as users click on results, and it dynamically displays search results as users type queries. The goal with the preview feature, in particular, is to make desktop search about more than finding e-mails and files, Horowitz said.
"Your search isn't done when you hit enter and see a page of search results returned to you," Horowitz said. "Generally, you are trying to complete a task."
For example, users can print previewed e-mails and documents or initiate a reply to an e-mail.
Unlike Google, whose desktop search co-mingles desktop and Web results in Google's Web site interface, Yahoo has separated results into categories. Hard-drive results are displayed within the client, where users can search either within specific categories such as e-mail, attachments and contacts or across all desktop data.
Users also can enter a query for a Web search and are taken to results from the Yahoo Search Web site.
Yahoo has created more than one way to enter its desktop search. Along with the client, the beta downloads a deskbar, which allows users to enter queries from the Windows taskbar, and an Outlook-based toolbar for launching searches
.:: Yahoo Desktop Search Debuts ::.
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