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By Alan Salmon

 The New World of Desktop Search Engines

If you’ve spent time, as I have, trying to find a file on your hard drive and come up empty the new world of desktop search engines will solve your problem in seconds. Google was first to market with the Google Desktop Search Engine earlier this year. Not to be outdone, Microsoft has just released their desktop search tool. Both make it remarkably easy to find files on your hard drive.

Google Desktop Search lets you retrieve e-mail, Microsoft Office documents, test files AOL chat logs, Adobe PDF files and a history of Web pages previously viewed, all via a Web browser. Plus, it finds this information in seconds.

To use Google's desktop application, you download a file from www.desktop.google.com. You must have at least 128 MB of memory installed on your PC, but the application uses only about 8 MB. Once the program is installed the software scans your hard drive in the background to index the full text of Word, Outlook e-mail, Excel files, text files, AOL chat logs, pdf files and saved Web pages from Internet Explorer; a process that typically takes between five and six hours. Then as the application runs, it indexes new documents and visited Web pages in real time.

Google Desktop seamlessly integrates with your Web browser. When you type "movies" in the search box, Google returns a list of Web results and a set of desktop results at the top of the page, earmarked with a new logo that's like a multicolored Olympic ring.

Under the desktop results, Google will show any previously viewed Web pages on movies, any e-mails or AOL instant messages mentioning films, or any Microsoft Office documents with the word “movies” anywhere in the document. The index will also show a photo or MP3 file that was labeled with the word in it. You can sort the desktop results by date or file type. You can also set preferences to block certain files from being indexed or seen in search results.

Google Desktop keeps a record of Web sites that you visit, including a log of cached copies of each version of the Web page when it was viewed. This could be a powerful tool for allowing comparisons of previous versions of a Web site with the current page. In terms of privacy, Google's application rests on your PC and does not share indexed data from the desktop with Google. What it does do, like most applications, is send a daily "ping" to Google's servers with information on the health of the application (for instance, whether it has crashed) and usage data in aggregate so that Google can tell how people are using features.

Microsoft has launched its long anticipated desktop search application, and it's packed with promising features and tools that make it a strong contender coming out the gate. MSN Desktop Search, available today as part of the MSN Toolbar Suite Beta, installs as both a browser toolbar and optionally in the Windows taskbar, as an unobtrusive search form.

To download the program go to http://beta.toolbar.msn.com/.

Like Google Desktop, the program indexes the contents of your personal computer and email, if you're a Microsoft Outlook user. MSN Desktop indexes more types of content than the Google Desktop, however, including photos, music, email attachments, programs and other types of content. Unlike the Google Desktop, the MSN Desktop does not index web pages that you've viewed.

Search results are displayed in a popup window as you type, progressively reducing the number of results as you type additional letters in your search terms. This is a neat feature that Google doesn’t have. The results are tagged as files or "all other items" to help you quickly differentiate between things like word documents and spreadsheets you created and other content on your computer.

These instant results are filenames that you can click on to quickly pull up content that you recognize. For more comprehensive search results with descriptions, dates, file sizes and other details, you can click a button to either search desktop items or web items, and expanded results are displayed in a browser window.

The controls available along the top of these expanded results allow you to limit results to documents, email, pictures and video, music, and a wide range of other file types.

The Microsoft program offers a number of useful shortcuts. In addition to providing quick access to files on your computer, you can also launch applications, documents, files and web sites through the Deskbar by creating and using custom shortcuts.

You can also create web shortcuts that access and search specific web sites with commands that take just a few keystrokes. The power users who don't mind taking the time to define shortcuts for frequently repeated searches will enjoy this feature.

MSN's Desktop Search joins an increasingly crowded group including Copernic, Google Desktop, and the soon to be released desktop search applications from Ask Jeeves and Yahoo.

I've only been able to do quick, preliminary tests using MSN Desktop, but so far I'm impressed with both the quality of search results and the speed with which they're found. The indexing function is also "polite," running in the background and stopping whenever computer resources are needed for another task.

One potential drawback, if you're already using another browser toolbar is that the Desktop search function is embedded within the overall MSN Toolbar Suite. Like it or not, you must install the browser toolbar to get the desktop search capabilities. The toolbar has a lot of useful functions, such as a popup blocker, a form fill utility and other tools, but it also takes up a lot of space, even when configured to display only icons rather than text and icons.

So which one is better? I’m sticking with Google for the moment. It’s the one I’ve grown used to and I find it really easy to use. I don’t need to find music and video files, so the MSN advantage in this area doesn’t mean a lot to me. The bottom line is that either one will save you a lot of time trying to find those old files. That works for me.

Alan Salmon is a member of Rotary eClub One

Alan Salmon, Managing Director of Alan Salmon & Associates Inc., is a leading authority on accounting software.  He is Vice-President, Canadian Operations of K2 Enterprises, a North American consulting firm providing technology training to accountants. In addition to his work with consultants, accountants, and software companies in both Canada and the US, he is the chairperson of the Microsoft Accounting Technology for the 21^st Century seminar series.  He can be reached by e-mail at asalmon@salmon.ca or by visiting www.salmon.ca.

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