Introduction
In the '90s, the web browser was the big app that analysts kept their eyes on. Netscape had an impressive headstart in the so-called "browser wars," but Navigator dwindled into obscurity after Microsoft decided the browsers should be free, and made part of the operating system.
Today, the Firefox team is making unanticipated dents into Internet Explorer's market share, but most people's attention has long since drifted away from that arena. Today's big app is the search. After Google demonstrated that searching could be effective, hip, and better yet, commoditized, they and other companies turned their eyes towards the desktop, deciding they wanted their piece of the pie (while this review focuses on PC software, Apple is including Spotlight, their own desktop search program, with Tiger).
Despite efforts made by competitors, Google has the largest share of the online search market. A look at their services shows they've got everything from Christmas catalogs to text translations covered. Only recently, though, have they broken out of their online-only world onto the desktop. While Google et al. have done a fairly good job of managing the explosion of information on the Internet, they haven't touched the data sitting on people's personal computers. Computers only provide the most rudimentary methods for locating data. It's usually faster to look for a file by hand than to entrust a search utility with the job.
"Desktop search" programs have two goals: to find the desired information, and to find it quickly. These search programs accomplish their speed by indexing the data they search through. Instead of poring through every file as if it was being searched for the first time, these programs prepare an index of the essential information about each file. If you have 100GB of videos sitting around, a desktop search program will ignore the data, culling out titles, authors, and other metadata. Even if a search algorithm operates by brute force, the smaller data set of an index is faster to get through.
Indexing services are very effective, but they've also been around for a long time. Anyone who's used the UNIX locate command has used an indexed search. Windows XP comes with an indexing service, but it's not turned on by default and few users even know that it's there.
The real novelty of desktop search apps can be found in their interfaces. The central design problem in these programs isn't finding the best way to catalog your information, but finding out how to let you best traverse it. A quick comparison of the programs reviewed here shows that there's still a long way to go with this on interface design. There's no consensus on a best method; everything from web interfaces to Start menu toolbars are used. However, this indicates that these developers are open to experimentation. The battles for the desktop has barely begun, but no one is going to let it go without a fight. Let's see what they have to offer.
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