Search is all about finding information quickly and accurately. Survival, at least according to Darwin, is all about adapting to changing environments faster than your rivals can. Being here tomorrow, even for the largest creatures on this Earth means being able to make evolutionary changes, developing new skills, and exploiting the slow pace of rivals before one of those rivals eats you for lunch. That’s the law of the jungle and as the Wolf Cubs say, it is as old and as true as the sky.
The search engine wars are back and today’s front-line stretches from your desktop to your hard-drive. Several search firms are working to introduce their own version of desktop search before the long-awaited release of Microsoft’s O/S Longhorn. What is desktop search, and why is it so important to the search engines?
The “desktop” is the base screen on your monitor, the one behind all the windows you have open now. Minimize everything you have open on your monitor right now. Once everything is minimized and you see all those short-cut icons, you’ve found the desktop. Unless you are in the habit of keeping your software open and computer running 24/7, the desktop is your natural starting point every time you turn on your computer. As all long journeys start with that first step, search engine firms see the desktop as the natural starting point for searchers. As it stands today, performing a search is at least a two step and often a three step process. First you have to open a web-browser such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla or Opera. Next, you either have to type a search engine URL into the address bar, or type your search terms into whatever search tool-bar you use. Now that you’ve accessed your favourite search engine, you are limited to searching for information that is stored on the web and has been indexed by that search engine. While your favourite search engine may have a massive database, you know there is a lot of information about the topic you’re searching that you are not seeing. For example, what happened to that memo your boss sent you by Email three months ago asking you to look into specific aspects of a product or service? How about that short note on a technical issue sent by your friends in the R&D department on the fifth floor? Or that poem you wrote where you compared your loved-one’s eyes with limpid pools. Those documents are stored on your hard-drive and are currently inaccessible to search engines that search only the web. That’s where the concept of Desktop searching comes in.
The idea behind searching your email or hard-drive is not new. Versions of MS Windows and Apple’s various O/S’s have always had some form of file-search but these where often slow and clunky as they searched your entire hard-drive for those elusive snippets of information. Anyone who has ever used the search feature included in MS Outlook will understand how it is both a major lifesaver and massive time waster. It takes a long time for Outlook to search through your email files to find that three-word phrase you’ve entered as your search term. A desktop search application will have already spidered your entire hard-drive much like search engines spider the web and will have a pretty good idea where to find what you are looking for in split-second time. Desktop search holds the promise of saving an incalculable amount of time for workers, researchers, businesses, academics and practically anyone else who uses computers.
In today’s Search Engine Watch, Danny Sullivan covers Google’s newest application, Google-Desktop. He offers the tool high praise and includes a short wish-list for Google’s engineering staff to read as they improve this product. As he notes in his article, with today’s release of Google-Desktop, they are the current leaders in this market but others are very close behind. Yahoo is rumored to be developing a desktop search feature and Microsoft may release a desktop search feature based on its noted, “Stuff I Have Seen” project. Ask.Com and A9 are also real forces in this phase of the SE Wars. The next few months should see the introduction of a number of desktop search applications. It will be interesting to see who’s application does what and which eventually makes the best mouse-trap.
Jim Hedger has written a widely read search marketing column for over five years. Co-host of Webcology on WebmasterRadio.FM, Jim is a writer and SEO consultant with Metamend Search Engine Marketing in Victoria BC.
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