New seekers
- Article 25 of 26
- M-iD, November 2005
A new generation of search tools aims to help corporate users find valuable content and information buried deep on their hard drives.
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How each search system achieves these things is where the differences emerge. For web search, the Google Desktop Search can pass its search to Google's own search engine, with Ask Jeeves, MSN and Yahoo doing similarly. Others, such as Copernic and Blinkx, have no such recourse and must use other companies' search engines.
Index updating is a greater differentiator. Yahoo's desktop search requires a manual or scheduled re-index, so its database can become quickly outdated in a busy environment. Other systems, such as Google's and MSN's, run a monitor process that use the Windows file system APIs [application programming interface] to receive almost instant notification of changes. Any amendments to files understood by the search tool and it adds the files to a queue. Then, at the next 'convenient' moment, the tool will amend its database with indexes of the updated or new files.
Depending on the tool, 'convenient' can mean different things: it certainly needs to be convenient to the computer, which will wait until other file system operations complete before starting the indexing; but tools such as Google's and MSN's will wait until user activity on the PC drops to a pre-defined level, to avoid slowing down the computer during everyday use - a trade-off between true database currency and usability. With a typical user however, updating the database will be a real-time activity.
Aside from interfaces, the other main differences arise from the file formats understood by each tool, with each vendor claiming hundreds of different formats to its credit. Surprisingly though, PDF search isn't common, with MSN requiring a separately downloaded plug-in, and support for Lotus Notes and Outlook variable: some support searches of Outlook emails only, while others support searches of tasks and events. Unsurprisingly, MSN's search tool provides the best Outlook search capabilities.
All of these facilities make desktop search tools useful for enterprises but not must-haves. Indeed, while Verity acquired a new desktop search tool from 80-20 Software in August, it has done little to sell this as anything more than a useful add-on for its existing clients, rather than marketing it as a product for drawing in new customers.
One of the biggest problems facing all the enterprise desktop search vendors is the slow march of corporations back towards centralised IT infrastructures, and, in particular, ECM systems. With all documents on a server, there's no need for a desktop search product except for laptops and other devices that may leave the network.
It's a situation faced by Edward Cowell, technical director of search engine marketing consultancy Neutralize, who has tested for his company virtually all the desktop search tools currently available. “If I like it, I keep it. Otherwise, I deactivate it.” He now has only the Google Desktop Search installed and uses that mainly for web searches. “We're a network-based company. We don't store a lot of stuff on our computers. Desktop search products are kind of redundant for us.”
Combining intranet search with desktop and web search would make the desktop search tools far more attractive to Cowell and others. It's something that Autonomy and FAST have already made possible in their own tools. However, despite the ability of Windows' existing search facility to tie into Windows Index Server (albeit only through undocumented commands), MSN's own search tool does not.
Google's efforts at penetrating the enterprise are similarly lacklustre, but are slowly improving. The initial version of Google Desktop Search stored its index unencrypted and indexed every document on the PC, no matter who owned it. It also indexed cached files from secure web sites. It posed such a corporate security risk that Gartner analyst Whit Andrews advised businesses to discourage the use of the tool.
Google fixed many of these problems in the latest version of the tool, splitting the indexes for different users, encrypting them and switching off indexing of certain secure file types. It has also created an enterprise version of the software, Google Desktop for Enterprise. Nikhil Bhata, product manager for Google Desktop, says that most of the features in the enterprise version are designed to “help IT administrators deploy the software easily and lock down certain functions”. More notably, Google signed a deal in October with IBM to allow the software access to IBM's WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition, making simultaneous desktop, enterprise and web search possible.
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