WashingtonPost.com (www.washingtonpost.com) announced on December 10 that the search engine giant Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) plans to offer a free, high-speed way to search for data on personal computers, challenging Google's U.S. release this fall of a similar product. Yahoo could announce the release of a test form of its search product as early as December 10, the Washington Post reported.
The product lets users search, not just e-mails and other documents on their hard drives, but also MP3 music files and saved Portable Document Format files, or PDFs, often used to distribute documents.
Yahoo, which has partnered with X1 Technologies (www.x1.com) for the venture, says its product is faster than Google's offering. The company's desktop search software tries to speed the process by employing a technology called typedown search that tries to guess at what the user wants before the user concludes typing a query.
