Yahoo Inc. has taken its first step to move desktop search beyond the data sitting on a user’s hard drive. Yahoo added a contextual search feature to its Desktop Search and officially launched the service, which has been in beta since January.
When Yahoo initially released a beta of Yahoo Desktop Search in January, it outlined plans to quickly tie in a range of its online services into the applications. Along with the online address book, Yahoo executives have said that content from Yahoo’s e-mail, photo-sharing and online groups services also will become searchable through desktop search.
To quickly get web search results, desktop users can turn to the new LiveWords feature to get brief search results. When users are searching for emails, IM archives, contacts or documents, they can highlight text within a preview pane and then click the LiveWords button to start their search.
Unlike Google’s desktop search tool, Yahoo’s won’t operate within a browser. The distinction means that Yahoo’s desktop searches won’t be co-mingled with online searches conducted at its website.
This is all just the beginning, wrote Warren Wan, product manager for Yahoo Desktop Search, in the company’s Weblog. Our goal is to make the word desktop in Yahoo Desktop Search refers simply to the place where you launch the product.
To activate indexing of Yahoo Messenger sessions, users must choose to archive chats in the instant messaging client, a Yahoo spokesperson said. Users are able to search the archived sessions whether they are online or off. Once indexed, contacts from the Yahoo Address Book also will be available whether users are online or off, the spokesperson said.
The rush to develop better technology for scouring computer hard drives reflects a belief that desktop search is an increasingly important complement to online search engines, where advertising has become a major moneymaker.
Yahoo had been widely expected to take this step since Google introduced a hard-drive search tool nearly two months ago. Microsoft’s MSN service hopes to introduce a similar product before year’s end and Ask Jeeves Inc, which runs several online search engines, plans to unveil its desktop offering shortly.
The competitive pressure likely motivated Yahoo to license an existing product.
The product, licensed from a pioneering startup named X1 Technologies, seeks to cure a common computer-induced headache by making it as quick and easy to find digital information offline as it has become online.
Both Yahoo and X1 contend it makes sense to maintain a dividing line between hard-drive search and web search because one quest focuses on recovering old information while the other strives to discover new information.
It’s kind of like looking for information that you know exists and looking for information that you think might exist somewhere out there, said X1 president Josh Jacobs. Keeping the two functions separate will also help Yahoo do a more thorough job of searching hard drives, said Jeff Weiner, who oversees Yahoo’s search division.
We have steadily been working on improving the core file, email and document search capabilities, Albert Lee, senior product manager at Yahoo Search, wrote in a company blog. Selecting a word or phrase that you’d like to know more about will…present you with the most relevant results.
Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, also says its product can sift through more than 225 different data types, including many formats that Google’s desktop search cannot index yet.
Neither Yahoo nor X1 disclosed financial details of their partnership. Yahoo had already spent about US$2 billion to acquire much of the technology behind the online search engine that it introduced earlier this year to compete with Google, which is based in Mountain View, California.
The ultimate vision is to create a dashboard to help people manage their digital lives, said Mr Weiner.