Desktop Search Round-up: Ask Jeeves Desktop Search Simple Interface, Simple Choice of Configuration Options Joseph Moran
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.
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
