May 19, 2006
True Desktop SearchFinding what you want when you want it is often easier said than done. Luckily the lines between the desktop and the Web are blurring—and the race is on for the best desktop search tool.Eric J. Bruno
Finding what you want when you want it is often easier said than done. Luckily the lines between the desktop and the Web are blurring—and the race is on for the best desktop search tool.
Eric J. Bruno is a consultant in New York who has worked extensively in developing real-time trading and financial applications. Contact him at eric@ericbruno.com.
Before the advent of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, performing searches on desktop computers often involved the familiar DOS command,
It wasn't long before Yahoo! became a leader in Web search, and, thanks in part to its partnership with Yahoo!, Google soon took the lead. In contrast, the power and popularity of Web searches far exceeded what was available for the desktop. It was more difficult to find information on your computer's hard drive than in the vastness of the global Web. This was the driving factor behind the introduction of desktop search tools, and the ensuing battle (similar to the browser wars of the late '90s) for desktop presence.
Inside Desktop Search
Desktop search tools, such as Google Desktop Search, quietly index all of the content on a computer's hard drive, including the contents of e-mail messages, text files, Web-browser history, Microsoft Office documents, instant message conversations, audio and video files and so on. For example, Google Desktop's preferences page (see Figure 1) lists the different types of files that can be indexed, and lets you specify which ones to include. The contents of the local index file are typically kept private, but are available to local users to locate content on a computer, or even shared network drives.
Figure 1
Google Desktop indexing preferences.
When a desktop search is performed, it's executed against the search engine's index of all content on the local computer (translation: it's fast!). The results of a search using most desktop search tools appear as they do with Web searches. Google Desktop results are broken out by content type (marked by a unique icon on the left), with thumbnail previews provided on the right for applicable results (Figure 2).
[Click image to view at full size]
Figure 2
Google Desktop Search results. 
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