Tags: Microsoft

Ask Jeeves Desktop Search Review

Having already checked out four other ‘desktop search’ utilities, I am a bit overwhelmed. For years, we had nothing but crappy windows internal search for finding out files on our systems. Now suddenly there is this massive rush from all these big tech giants to get their software on our machines.

And all this for free! Moreover, the interesting thing is that all of these services are good efforts. Each one of these utilities has its own powers and weaknesses. I am struggling to choose the best one out of them. Ask Jeeves Desktop Search adds to that confusion.

Ask Jeeves Desktop Search comes in a 744KB installer and offer two types of crawling options. Gradual takes it own time to index up the hard drive eating minimal system resources. While, Fast option can be used to quickly get the application to crawl through the hard drive for fast results.

The application took around 10 Megs of ram while doing fast indexing which is decent compared to competition. The exciting part of Ask Jeeves Desktop Search is the simplified interface. It runs in its own window and initially offers two settings. Quick Start avoids the entire hard drives and just index Desktop, My Documents folder and email. This option is good for users who keep their data in a limited place. However, for most users, Custom setting would come handy. It covers entire hard drive.

For some reason, Ask Jeeves Desktop Search just refused to take Outlook configuration on the test system thus could not index the mails. As with many other desktop searches, no other mail clients are supported. Outlook Express support is in pipeline.

The application indexed the system quickly with fast setting on. The interface for desktop search is divided into two parts. One division shows the search results while the other shows preview of the selected file. Ask Jeeves Desktop Search separates search results into various sub-options namely Folders, My Documents, Pictures, Videos, Music, Office Documents, Internet Bookmarks, and Applications. These can be individually clicked to get the filtered results of the searched query.

However, testing the desktop search was somewhat disappointing. Despite the software showing 100% indexing, it missed on quiet many test files. HTML and even text files were missed. PDFs are apparently not being indexed at all. There are few options to sort out results when compared to MSN Desktop Search. No custom file extension searching is offered similar to Copernic Desktop Search. Maybe that justifies the BETA label that this application comes with.

The software needs work but it can potentially be a good option with PCs with average configuration. Desktop Search software from Google and MSN are relatively more resource hungry. Ask can perhaps even aim at users not into Microsoft applications to create a separate market of its own.

One-thing this application shares with Copernic is internal web searching option. It uses Internet Explorer rendering engine and allows user to do Internet searching from the application itself. MSN and Google on the other hand merge the desktop search on their search engines accessible from the web browser.

Addendum: Ask Jeeves Desktop Search has this tiny surprise up its sleeve. It adds a new search box to applications Open Dialog Boxes. It can be used to search for keywords directly from the Ask Jeeves Desktop Search.