Desktop Search Round-up: Search Engine Power for Your PC Ask Jeeves Desktop Search Joseph Moran
Ask Jeeves Desktop Search
Next up is Ask Jeeves Desktop Search, which is currently available for download in beta format. Like Yahoo! Desktop Search, Ask Jeeves Desktop Search requires Windows XP or 2000 to run, and it uses a Windows application rather than a browser window for its search interface.
File and application support for ADS is limited and lacks the breadth and depth of competing tools from Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft. That said, it does support the most ubiquitous file types used today. The range of searchable data for ADS spans files created in Microsoft Office 2000 or later, including .doc, .xls, and .ppt, and Microsoft Outlook e-mail. This list noticeably fails to include Outlook Express — Ask Jeeves says that capability will be forthcoming.
Although Ask Jeeves cites the ability to search Web page history, we could find no evidence of this feature — only the ability to search within Internet Explorer Favorites.
In the realm of digital media, ADS supports the most popular forms of still graphics, video, and audio files, including JPEG, GIF, MPEG, MP3, and WMA. Notably absent, at least for now, is support for PDF or any kind of compressed file.
After first installing ADS, you can choose whether you want to limit indexing to e-mail plus the files in My Documents and on the Desktop, or include all files on the system. You also can select one of two modes for indexing — "gradual" (the default) or "fast." The latter comes with a caveat that it could slow down your system, a warning we definitely should have heeded. Instead, we blithely chose to index all files under the fast setting, and it wasn't long before this caused the utility to consume so much CPU bandwidth (well over 90%) that our system became about as responsive as a sloth on sedatives.
Manually closing the process, rebooting the system, and de-selecting the fast option restored some alacrity to our test system, but then the indexing process proceeded at a rather leisurely pace ... over 2½ hours later, Ask Jeeves' index was still only 93% complete. In contrast, Yahoo! Desktop Search completed its initial index of our test system in just over an hour.
Simple Interface
The ADS interface is not nearly as busy as Yahoo!'s — in fact, it's quite austere, providing little more than an empty field and three buttons for searching the Computer, E-Mail, and Web. This means, however, that if you want to search for a word or phrase in more than one of those locations, you must conduct separate searches for each. On the plus side, when displaying results from a search, ADS breaks them down so you can see how many were found in each of the various categories ADS indexes. This makes the results much easier to digest visually.
As with Yahoo! Desktop Search, Ask Jeeves Desktop Search also provides a preview pane, but it's considerably less useful than Yahoo's version. The ADS Preview Pane isn't quite the equivalent of opening a file in an application — in the case of Word files, for example, it displays only the raw text of the file, which doesn't include aspects such as formatting and embedded graphics.
Strangely, the preview pane was also unable to preview Excel files, and even for many of the .doc files we viewed it omitted large portions of text. Moreover, while ADS's preview can be used to view a selected file, to do anything else with it requires double-clicking the entry to open its native application. (It does a better job with graphics and streaming media, letting you view or play the file directly from the main interface.)
ADS doesn't integrate with Outlook or the Windows Taskbar, but it does automatically hook onto Windows' File|Open common dialog, giving you the opportunity to conduct searches from within any application that uses it.
One privacy caveat is that unlike the other search tools here, ADS will index and display files on the system created by and belonging to other users. This might be a concern if multiple users share a system, even if they each have their own profile.
Customization Options Lacking
A big drawback of Ask Jeeves Desktop Search is that it provides almost no ability to customize what information is indexed or when. The aforementioned configuration options (along with the ability to define a specific Outlook Profile for indexing) are the extent of the user-adjustable options.
Unfortunately, ADS provides no options to control when indexing occurs or filters for the types of information indexed. You can choose whether to index just files or e-mails, but beyond that it's all or nothing.
Overall, Ask Jeeves Desktop Search gets the job done for basic search tasks, but with a Preview Pane that's rough around the edges and a lack of configuration options, it's hard to recommend the current incarnation of Ask Jeeves over the competition.
Pros:Simple, uncluttered interface; freeware
Cons:Limited configuration options and file support (lacks search support for Web pages, IM chats, PDF files, compressed files, and more), slow indexing relative to other desktop search clients, preview pane capabilities pale in comparison to those of Yahoo! Desktop Search
