The search engine Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com) announced on December 16 the launch of a beta desktop search application (http://sp.ask.com/docs/desktop/), capping off a very busy year in the desktop search space. Just a year ago, consumer oriented desktop search was only available from a few small companies like Enfish (www.enfish.com), dtSearch (www.dtsearch.com) and x1 (www.x1.com). This year, all of the major search engines have entered or will soon enter the desktop search fray. Ask Jeeves' interest in desktop search became apparent when the company purchased desktop search technology company Tukaroo in June.
The Ask Jeeves Desktop program is a standalone application. The download runs about 750kb. File formats searched include Microsoft Office files (Word, PowerPoint, Excel), Microsoft Outlook (Outlook Express is not available in this beta release), basic text files, images, music in the MP3 format, and video files. This release only searches titles and metadata from Adobe PDF files.
Jim Lanzone, Ask Jeeves Senior Vice President of Search Properties, said that it's a very good time to put Ask Jeeves Desktop Search in the hands of early adopters and get some feedback on it. Lanzone believes that desktop search is still one to two years away from being an application used by the mainstream searcher.
